Dolphin House Hurghada — The Honest Guide

Dolphin House — Sha'ab El Erg — is a horseshoe reef north of Hurghada where wild spinner dolphins rest during the day. It is one of the most booked trips in the town, and it is also the one most often oversold.

So, plainly:

The dolphins are wild, and nobody can guarantee them

These are not captive animals in a pool. They are a wild pod in open water, doing what they want, and some days they are not there.

Any operator who guarantees you a dolphin sighting is lying, and you should treat everything else they tell you with the same suspicion. What an honest operator can tell you is that sightings are common — most trips find them — and that the boat goes to where the pod has actually been seen that week rather than to a fixed dot on a map.

Book it wanting a good day on the water with a strong chance of dolphins, and you will almost certainly get one. Book it having been promised dolphins, and you are one bad morning away from a ruined holiday.

You do not swim with them the way you are imagining

The photographs in the adverts show a person and a dolphin, alone, in blue water, touching. That is not what happens and it should not be.

What happens is that the boat finds the pod, you get in the water quietly at a distance, and you watch them pass — sometimes close, sometimes not. You do not chase them, you do not touch them, and a good guide will stop you if you try. Spinner dolphins rest in the daytime; a boatload of tourists driving them out of their resting reef is how a pod stops coming back, and then there is no trip for anybody.

Seeing a wild pod move underneath you in open water is genuinely extraordinary. It is just not a petting zoo, and you should want it not to be.

What the day is actually like

• Hotel pickup, then out by boat — Dolphin House is further out than the island trips, so there is real time on the water.
• The captain looks for the pod. This is the part that cannot be scheduled.
• Snorkelling stops on the reef, which is excellent in its own right whether or not the dolphins show.
• Lunch on board.
• Back in the afternoon.

Our trip: Dolphin Tour Hurghada.

How to give yourself the best chance

• Go early in your holiday. Then if the sea is rough or the pod is absent, you have days left to try again. If you book it for your last morning, you get one roll of the dice.
• Go on a calm day. Wind wrecks visibility and makes the boat unpleasant. Ask us what the week looks like.
• Be in the water quickly and quietly. The people who see the most are the ones who are not still fumbling with a mask when the pod arrives.
• Do not chase. Genuinely — the ones who chase see less, because the pod moves away from them.

Is it right for children and non-swimmers?

Children are fine — life jackets are on board in every size and the snorkelling is supervised. Non-swimmers can float in a jacket and watch, and many do.

But if the whole point for your family is the reef rather than the dolphins, and nobody is a confident swimmer, the glass-bottom boat or one of the calmer island trips may simply be a better day out. We would rather tell you that than sell you the more expensive ticket.