About this guide
Visit Valley of the Kings is an independent travel guide to the Valley of the Kings and the West Bank of Luxor, with the temples of Karnak and Luxor on the East Bank. It is written by Patrick Kühne, a travel publisher based in Germany.
Not an official site
This guide has no connection to the Egyptian state, to the antiquities service or to any tour operator. The monuments of Luxor are the responsibility of the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, formed in December 2019 when the ministries of tourism and of antiquities merged, and of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, which manages the sites themselves. The official monuments portal is egymonuments.gov.eg, and tickets are sold through the ministry’s booking portal, egymonuments.com. Ticket prices, opening hours and tomb closures are decided there and at the ticket offices on site, not by us.
If a last entry time, an extra tomb ticket or the reopening of a tomb matters for your plans, check it with the ticket office before you set off. For entry rules and safety, the German Foreign Office and the UK Foreign Office publish travel advice for Egypt that we use as our reference.
Where the facts come from
History and site descriptions come from the UNESCO World Heritage listing for Ancient Thebes with its Necropolis and from reference works on the individual sites. Sun times are from the US Naval Observatory, entry rules from the German and UK foreign offices, and driving distances from our own route calculations with OpenStreetMap data, which is why those pages say "about" or "roughly". Each page lists its sources, all checked in November 2026.
Entrance fees and opening hours need a special note. We read them on the official ticket portal, egymonuments.com, on 2 November 2026, and every page gives them with that date. The portal lists the time of last entry rather than a closing time, so that is what our pages give: in the Valley of the Kings, for example, last entry is 17:00 in summer and 16:00 in winter. It does not say on which dates the summer and winter hours start, and where it shows no price, as for Deir el-Medina, we give none.
How tours are picked
A tour appears here when it visits the sites the page is about and starts in Luxor, or in Hurghada, Makadi Bay or Marsa Alam for the day trips across the desert. Transfers without a guide and day trips to Aswan or Abu Simbel are left out. Duration, pickup, inclusions and age limits are taken from the tour pages. Where reviewers keep raising the same problem, such as shop stops on group tours, extra cash charges or a very early pickup on the Red Sea, the page says so. When the booking platform stops listing a tour, it disappears from the site automatically.
How the site is paid for
Tour cards and comparison tables link to GetYourGuide and, for tours not listed there, to Viator. If you book through one of these links, we receive a commission and your price stays the same. Prices and ratings are loaded from the platform; we do not write or change them.
We are not a tour operator and do not take bookings. Questions about a booking go to the platform or to the operator named on it.
Photos
The photos come from Unsplash and Pexels. Most show the place on the page; a few show a neighbouring site, such as the workers' village of Deir el-Medina on the Valley of the Queens page. The captions describe only what is in the picture and name the photographer.
Contact
Contact details are in the legal notice.