Salem Balloons Luxor — Local services in New Al Qarnh City

Heart stopping experience! If ever you are in Luxor, do go for hot air ballooning. The Ariel views of Luxor temples are just enthralling. The pick start real early at 6 am. Then you board your felucca. You are served a small breakfast with tea here and then sail to the east bank of the city. There you take a mini van and go to the hot air ballooning ground. Each balloon generally has 12 to 16 people. You can opt for special experiences with lesser people but honestly it does not make much difference only you are up in the sky. I was extremely lucky as our pilot Mr Ahmed was very efficient and informative. The take offs and landing were super smooth and the air time was around an hour which is really decent. All in all, it's been one of my highlights of my...

We were picked up on time at 3:30 am. The boat greeted us with coffee which was nice. However, I was quite disappointed to find that cameras are not allowed. Only cell phones (conveniently, they do sell videos and USB). Not being allowed to take my own decent photos was frustrating on its own. But I found that our balloon driver also did not evenly rotate the balloon. So I was trapped in a very filled cart without a reasonable view of the sunrise. The view on the other side of the cart looked like it had potential. I would have liked to have done more rotations to keep things fair. I also requested a comment card at the end as our leader gave out a few but was told that it’s fine. And was...

We had lovely views as we flew over Luxor for about an hour. Fantastic experience, made even better by our good-humoured and skilled pilot, Mahmoud. He took us to see, from the sky, his village, his mother and his wife's grandfather. It was very funny to see him talking to the people working in the wheat fields. Many thanks also to the entire crew, who were very friendly, looked after everyone and worked well as a team. There was a lot of work to do, such as assembling the balloon, preparing for takeoff and helping us during landing....