Makadi Bay for Families: What It Is and What It Is Not

The email arrives at the desk every few weeks in slightly different clothes, but it is always the same email. A family has booked a week in Makadi Bay, then found a forum thread announcing there is nothing there, and now they want to know if they have made a mistake. The thread is right, incidentally. There is nothing there, in the sense the thread means. Whether that makes the booking a mistake is a different question, and it depends entirely on who is travelling. Here are the questions we actually get asked, answered straight.

Is it true there's no town?

True. Makadi Bay is a purpose-built resort bay about half an hour's drive south of Hurghada's airport (HRG), just past Sahl Hasheesh on the road toward Safaga. It consists of hotels, the landscaped roads between hotels, a golf development, and the sea. No old quarter, no harbour with fishermen mending nets, no street where anyone actually lives. A small commercial strip serves the resorts with the usual pharmacies, souvenir shops and cafés, but nobody would call it a town and you should not arrive expecting one.

If your idea of a holiday involves stumbling into a backstreet café and staying three hours, book Hurghada or El Gouna. If your idea involves a gate, a warm shallow bay, and children you can count at a glance, keep reading.

So what do families do all day?

The bay, mostly, and that is less of a limitation than it sounds. Makadi's curve of coast is sheltered compared with the open, windier stretches further down the coast, the sand shelves gently in most resort sections, and the hotels are arranged around their pools the way older towns are arranged around squares. Add kids' clubs, evening entertainment of variable dignity, and a water park — Makadi Water World, over in the Madinat Makadi half of the development, with hotel packages that include or discount entry — and a seven-day rhythm assembles itself without any planning at all. Pool, beach, buffet, slide, repeat. Some visitors call this monotony. Parents of four-year-olds tend to call it a rescue.

Is the snorkelling real, or brochure talk?

Real, with caveats. Several Makadi hotels sit on house reefs — living coral you reach from a jetty, no boat required, which for families with young or nervous swimmers is the whole game. Sergeant majors in their prison stripes, parrotfish grinding away at the coral, the occasional lionfish keeping its own counsel under an overhang. The caveat: reef quality varies sharply from one hotel to the next, and jetties are generally for that hotel's guests only. If snorkelling is the point of the trip, research the specific hotel's reef, not the bay in general. The gap between the best house reef here and the worst is the gap between an actual reef and a roped-off swimming area with some rocks in it.

What is Madinat Makadi?

The inland half of the development, behind the beachfront row: more hotels, the water park, and an 18-hole golf course that is the bay's one genuine visual surprise — fairway green laid against bare desert hills. Most families see the golf only from a transfer window. A golfing parent, though, can vanish for a morning without leaving the bay, which has saved more than one family holiday.

When should we leave the bay?

At least once, or the week blurs. Hurghada's marina and the El Dahar old town are close enough for an evening that doesn't end at a buffet. Boat trips run out to Orange Bay and the Giftun islands for the postcard water. Desert outfits run quad and stargazing trips into the hills behind the coast. Luxor is a long day trip — a genuinely long one, leaving before dawn — but it is the difference between visiting Egypt and visiting a hotel that happens to be in Egypt. Every hotel desk and every operator in the bay will sell you all of these; compare prices before you buy, because markups vary widely.

Give it to us straight. Is Makadi boring?

Makadi Bay solves the problems of travelling with children by removing the variables: traffic, haggling, navigation, the nightly search for dinner. The honest cost is that it removes the country too. You can spend a week here and see Egypt only through glass. Whether that is a flaw or the entire design depends on the age of your children and the state of your nerves in the week you board the plane. We keep meeting families on their fourth Makadi trip, and we keep meeting families who swore off it after one. Both, we have concluded, are right.