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I have just returned from the Egypt and the Nile Contiki trip, and I need to warn everyone about a scam we ran into. It involves the waiters and managers on the cruise ship (in our case the M/S Carmen but they are mostly all owned by thee same company; Egypt Hotels).
When we ordered drinks on the boat, the waiter would write down our order, pass us the pad to sign for the order, then retrieve the pad, tear off a pink carbon copy receipt for us and go and get us the drink. The bill was to be paid at the end of the trip. When I came to pay for my bill at the end of the cruise I was shocked to find a list of bills that were much larger than anything I had signed for. I asked for their copy of the receipt which the management produced after much reluctance, which clearly showed that they had added drinks to the receipt AFTER I had signed my name at the bottom. For example, I ordered one beer. The receipt they produced had “1 x beer” written down and just under it in a different handwriting “2 x Heineken beer”. I never drink Heineken, and nobody else ordered with me, just the waiter and I were present, so I can be 100% sure that this was falsified on purpose. What is more, during that night, the waiters didn’t give us the pink receipts. This turned out to be because they were unable to forge our bills and add drinks if we had the pink receipts. I had been given 6 out of the 10 pink slips for the cruise. These pink slips I had tallied perfectly with the blue receipts they had kept for the drinks. But for the 4 bills that I wasn’t given a pink receipt for, I had had many beers and cokes added by the hotel afterwards.
When I noticed this had happened upon paying the bill, I asked around and soon enough, there were a number of people that had found their bills to be doctored. Different hand writing was used, cokes were added to people’s bills who were caffeine intolerant (impossible!), some bills were summarised as “3 x beer, 1 x beer” which doesn’t make sense as they would have just written “4 x beer”. I now discovered at least 6 other people extremely unhappy with the way their bills had been falsified. The management of the cruise ship was very hostile towards us, and our tour guide had disappeared. We argued for about 2 hours but things were getting more and more heated and we looked like getting stuck on the ship with the armed police present without any ability to speak Arabic and defend ourselves, it was a very scary and unpleasant experience. We were then basically forced to pay the inflated bills as otherwise we would be unable to carry on with our tour.
After that night, I asked around and found more people who had paid their bills but had secretly been suspicious of the high amount but hadn’t said anything. I believe that in total at the very least 10 people were scammed like this. I was charged 184 Egyptian pounds too much; other people were overcharged by different amounts. This was a horrible experience as I felt threatened and forced to pay for forged bills by people who had no respect or courtesy for us and were vicious and spiteful. The waiters were certainly involved, and I have good reason to believe that the management were also involved due to their complete lack of concern, insistence that we pay and unwillingness to investigate multiple reports of theft from on their ship.
PLEASE be aware of this forgery. Keep and ask for every single pink receipt that you can, tell all your fellow tour friends to do the same, then they can't scam you.
Finally, this trip was the most fun trip I have ever had, so do enjoy yourselfs, it is truly fantastic. I just need to make sure that Egypt hotels get punished for what they did you us and that nobody else gets treated like we did.
Nick
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