How the registry is built and the full file index.

The file index.

File	Lead editor	Cadence
Luxor Pass	Hassan al-Maliki	Quarterly
Giza Pass	Sara Habashi	Quarterly
Combined Cairo-museum pass	Sara Habashi	Quarterly
Expat-resident card	Yasser Kamel	Quarterly
Multi-day validity	Reem Sabbagh	Reference
Refund-policy tracker	Reem Sabbagh	Quarterly
Annual policy-changes log	Reem Sabbagh	Annual

The three-stream verification cycle.

Stream one — Tourism Authority published framework. Downloaded from the official portal on the first Monday of each quarter, with the full PDF or web copy archived in the editorial system. Stream two — direct site visits. The three field editors visit twelve to fifteen participating sites per quarter, present the relevant pass at the ticket window, and record the gate-applied rule. Stream three — reader-observer reports. The forty-three travellers, fourteen expat residents and six tour operators in our network file structured reports on their own pass usage. Discrepancies across the three streams are documented openly in the corrections log; the December transparency note summarises the year's verification work.

The corrections process.

Corrections to published readings are issued within thirty days of confirmation. The log has been continuously maintained since 2019 and currently holds eighty-four entries. About forty percent of corrections come from the Tourism Authority's records office responding to our published queries; thirty-five percent from reader-observers reporting different gate experiences; twenty-five percent from the cooperative's own quarterly review.

The reader-observer network.

The cooperative's most distinctive editorial resource is the reader-observer network — currently forty-three travellers (mostly returning travellers who use Egyptian pass categories repeatedly), fourteen expatriate residents holding the expat-resident card, and six tour operators with day-to-day pass-handling experience. The network is the registry's primary source of ground-truth gate-experience information that the editor visits alone cannot supply. Reader-observers receive EGP 200 per accepted structured report; the honorarium pool consumes approximately eleven percent of the cooperative's annual revenue. We expand the network each year as the subscriber base grows; the 2026 plan is to recruit ten additional travel-trade observers focused on the new Combined Cairo-museum pass which is structurally new and where the gate-applied rules are still settling.

The annual reader survey.

The cooperative runs an annual reader survey in May each year. The survey captures structured feedback on the registry's editorial output, the methodology document's clarity, the booking-process references' accuracy, and the cooperative's response times. The 2025 survey received eighty-seven responses (about forty-eight percent of the subscriber base at the time). The survey responses inform the September methodology revision.

The relationship with international tourism-policy bodies.

The cooperative maintains informal collegial relationships with two international tourism-policy organisations whose work overlaps with our subject matter: the World Tourism Organization's Cairo regional office, which monitors Egypt's tourism-sector policy more broadly, and the International Council of Museums (ICOM) which sets the broader ethical framework that Egyptian museums operate within. Neither organisation funds the registry or has any editorial influence over our work; the relationships are working academic relationships of the kind that develop in any specialist field, and they are documented in the December transparency note for completeness.

The cooperative's approach to commercial pass-resellers.

Commercial pass-reselling platforms — typically online services that sell the Tourism Authority's passes at a markup with added booking convenience — are an established part of the broader travel-trade ecosystem but they are not the registry's working partners. The cooperative does not endorse any specific reseller, does not accept funding or sponsorship from any reseller, does not embed pass-resale links in any of our published content, and does not advise readers on which resellers to use. Readers asking about pass-reselling platforms are directed to the Tourism Authority's published guidance on official versus unofficial outlets. The registry's editorial position is that the reseller market is a legitimate part of the broader travel ecosystem but that its growth has created confusion for visitors about which pass tier applies; documenting the actual Tourism Authority framework openly is the registry's contribution to clearing the confusion.

The Tourism Authority informal collaboration.

The cooperative's relationship with the Tourism Authority is collegial and informal. The Authority's records office uses the registry's published quarterly tables as one of its internal cross-references; the Authority's records director has visited the Beni Suef office twice (in 2021 and 2024) as part of broader regional consultations. Reem's previous role at the Authority is a known professional connection; we maintain editorial distance through the explicit refusal of any funding, consulting fees or formal status from the Authority. The cooperative has declined three approaches from the Authority since 2020 — two requests to incorporate the registry's data into the Authority's published portal as an official source (we declined to preserve editorial independence), and one informal proposal to merge the registry's accessibility audit with the Authority's own internal review (we declined because the merger would have compromised the methodology's independence).

The corrections log — open and continuously maintained since 2019.

Corrections to published readings are issued within thirty days of confirmation and recorded in the public corrections log. The log has been maintained continuously since the registry's first issue in 2019 and currently holds eighty-four entries. Each entry includes the affected pass file, the original reading, the corrected reading, the date of the correction, the source citation that prompted the correction, and the editor's brief note explaining the discrepancy. The corrections log is the cooperative's most-consulted single archive document by visiting researchers; the December annual transparency note consolidates the year's corrections into a summary table.

The CSV/JSON export schema in detail.

The cooperative's quarterly machine-readable export uses a documented schema that travel-trade subscribers integrate into their own booking systems. The schema covers fifteen fields per pass record: pass identifier, pass category, current tier (where applicable), tourist-tier fee in US dollars, resident-tier fee in Egyptian pounds, validity period in days, list of included sites (as an array), refund-window in hours, refund-conditions free-text, last-verified date, source-stream code, gate-applied-variance flag, variance free-text where applicable, lead-editor identifier, and version number for the record. The schema documentation is sent with each export and is also available in the cooperative's open archive. The Travel-trade and Institutional subscribers receive the CSV/JSON export as part of the subscription benefit; the export is conditional on the subscriber's agreement to the non-commercial-redistribution terms.

The data-licensing approach.

The registry's quarterly tables are released under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA, free for academic, journalistic and individual-traveller use with citation. Commercial use — for instance, embedding the registry's data in a travel-trade booking application — requires a separate licence. Three commercial licences have been granted since 2021 on negotiated terms appropriate to the specific use. The licensing income is modest (under three percent of annual revenue) but is documented in the transparency note.

The cooperative's stance on regulatory advocacy.

A recurring question from new subscribers and from travel-trade industry associations is whether the cooperative engages in advocacy with the Tourism Authority on policy changes — for example, lobbying for clearer gate-applied rules or for more visitor-friendly refund policies. The answer is no, deliberately. The cooperative's editorial value depends on the documentary stance described on the about page; advocacy would compromise it. Where the cooperative identifies a recurring gap between the Tourism Authority's published framework and the gate-applied rules, we document the gap openly and let the Authority's records office, the broader travel-trade industry and the visiting public draw their own conclusions and pursue any changes through their respective regulatory channels. The cooperative has been asked to join three industry-association policy-advocacy initiatives since 2020 — we declined each, with the refusal logged in the corresponding year's transparency note.

The cooperative's stance on commercial pass-resellers.

Commercial pass-reselling platforms — typically online services that sell the Tourism Authority's passes at a markup with added booking convenience — are an established part of the broader travel-trade ecosystem but they are not the registry's working partners. The cooperative does not endorse any specific reseller, does not accept funding or sponsorship from any reseller, does not embed pass-resale links in any of our published content, and does not advise readers on which resellers to use. Readers asking about pass-reselling platforms are directed to the Tourism Authority's published guidance on official versus unofficial outlets. The registry's editorial position is that the reseller market is a legitimate part of the broader travel ecosystem but its growth has created confusion for visitors about which pass tier applies; documenting the actual Tourism Authority framework openly is the registry's contribution to clearing the confusion.

The annual external audit.

Since 2022 the registry commissions an annual external audit of its methodology by a rotating panel of two specialists — typically one tourism-policy academic and one travel-industry consultant. The audit reviews the year's verification work, checks the corrections log and verifies the financial transparency note. The 2022 to 2025 audit statements have all been positive.

The data-licensing approach.

The registry's quarterly tables are released under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA, free for academic, journalistic and individual-traveller use with citation. Commercial use — for instance, embedding the registry's data in a travel-trade booking application — requires a separate licence. Three commercial licences granted since 2021.

The cooperative's governance and the editorial board.

The cooperative is governed by the four editors as an editorial board with the administrator attending without voting rights. Major editorial decisions — admission of a new pass category, change to the verification methodology, acceptance of a new data-licensing arrangement, change to the annual external audit panel — require a three-of-four board vote. The board meets monthly at the Beni Suef office. Decisions are minuted and the summary minutes are published in the December annual transparency note each year.

Frequent questions on methodology.