Friends in Europe ask me this every single summer, so I am putting it here once. On a private day in Egypt the guide and the driver are two different people doing two different jobs. The guide comes inside the site with you and has to buy a guide ticket to do it. The driver stays outside with the car. He will move it round to whichever gate you are actually coming out of, and your water and your bags stay in the boot with the engine running. That is what a private car buys you in August. It has nothing to do with the seats. You walk out of the Egyptian Museum into 40 degrees and the car is thirty metres away and already cold inside. The second thing people get wrong is tipping. It is normal and expected here, and it is two envelopes, guide and driver separately. Visitors often arrive expecting to hand over one lot to somebody at the finish and it makes for an awkward two minutes in the hotel driveway. For a full Cairo day this year the people I know have been giving each of them somewhere between 200 and 400 EGP, depending how the day went. Nobody will ask you. Decide your number before you get in the car.
