Sahl Hasheesh Now Has About 4,000 Hotel Rooms, and a UK Operator Says Its Egypt Customers Have Swapped Sharm for Hurghada

Sahl Hasheesh now has about 4,000 hotel rooms along a beachfront of roughly 7.5 miles, nineteen years after the empty desert coast south of Hurghada was first developed as a resort town in 2007, according to a feature published on Saturday by the British travel trade magazine Travel Weekly.

The magazine's reporter stayed at Al Kasr, a five-star Red Sea Hotels property and the newest resort in Sahl Hasheesh, which opened a year ago. Its general manager, Nader Ibrahim, told Travel Weekly that the density of competition sets the standard: "If you do not perform well as a hotel here, you will not survive. For that reason, the quality of hotels and service is high and never really drops."

The feature's central claim is about where British holidaymakers now go. Peter Kearns, executive director at Red Sea Holidays, told the magazine that in 2015, 80% of the UK market visiting Egypt went to Sharm el-Sheikh and the other 20% to Hurghada, and that "now, that has completely flipped for us over the past 10 years." Travel Weekly links the shift to the 2015 Sharm el-Sheikh aircraft bombing and the UK ban on flights to and from that resort, which ran until 2019 and sent British holidaymakers looking for other Egyptian destinations.

Hurghada International Airport handled 11.4 million passengers in 2025, the first year it passed 10 million, the magazine reports. Its annual capacity more than doubled from 5.5 million to 13 million with the new Terminal 1 complex in 2014 and the modernisation of Terminal 2 in 2019. This site reported this week that 2.13 million passengers passed through Hurghada in two months, ahead of every other Egyptian regional airport.

The piece also sets out how the coast was built in stages:

• Hurghada began as a small fishing village in the early 20th century and was earmarked for tourism in the 1980s
• El Gouna and Soma Bay followed in the 1990s
• Makadi Bay came in 2004, and Sahl Hasheesh from 2007
• Hurghada Marina, now moored with hundreds of yachts, opened in 2008

One detail in the feature is worth a visitor's attention: the reporter found clusters of moon jellyfish floating in the shallows off Sahl Hasheesh, close enough to bump against bare feet, and notes that their sting does not hurt.

This is a trade feature written for British travel agents rather than a statistical release. It carries no 2026 passenger or occupancy figures, no room rates, and no comment from Red Sea tourism authorities.