An open knowledge base on Egyptian heritage, kept honest by keeping it free.

How the project started

Quick4Pass began in 2021 as a shared spreadsheet between four friends in Cairo, each of whom kept fielding the same questions from visiting relatives. Which museum is worth the time? Is the Tutankhamun supplement worth it? When does Karnak open and how do you beat the buses? After answering the same questions by message a dozen times, the obvious move was to write the answers down once, properly, and put them somewhere anyone could read them. The first guide — the Egyptian Museum on Tahrir — went online in mid-2021. By the end of that year there were twenty-eight guides and a few hundred readers a month.

The base grew by word of mouth and by the slow accumulation of maintained guides. By 2023 it had crossed eighty guides and the founders had been joined by two more volunteers. The project registered as a non-profit cultural association that year, mostly so it could hold the small running fund transparently and accept the occasional reader donation without it being a personal payment to anyone. As of the spring 2026 cycle the base carries 124 maintained guides across 35 places, read by something over fifty thousand people a month, most of them in the weeks before a trip.

We have kept the project small deliberately. A larger operation would need revenue, and revenue in travel publishing almost always means advertising, affiliate commission or sponsored placements — the exact things that made the existing free information untrustworthy. By staying small and volunteer-maintained, we keep the base honest. The cost of that decision is that we cannot cover everything; the benefit is that everything we do cover, we cover without a conflict of interest.

The rules we hold to

The project runs on five standing rules. They decide which guides we write and what we refuse to do. Holding to them costs the base the revenue a commercial site would take for granted. We think they are the whole point.

1. We walk it ourselves. Every guide is based on a visit by a Quick4Pass volunteer who bought an ordinary ticket and walked the place during the published hours. We do not write about places we have not visited.
2. We buy our own tickets. No press passes, no comped entry, no familiarisation trips, no VIP access. The cost comes out of the running fund, not from the site.
3. No commission, no affiliates, no sponsorship. No link in the base pays us when a reader books or buys anything. No tour operator, hotel, cruise company or ticket reseller has any financial relationship with the project.
4. No advertising. The base carries no display advertising, no native advertising, no sponsored guides. It is funded by the running fund and the occasional reader donation, both open on the funding page.
5. We say so when it isn't worth it. The base says when a supplement is overpriced, when a site is unpleasant in a given month, when a tour wastes money. We have no reason to soften any of it, because no one pays us to be kind.

The volunteers

Quick4Pass is maintained by a small group of Cairo-based volunteers. None of us is paid by a tour operator or a hotel, and the running fund pays no salaries. Guides are signed at the foot with the volunteer's initials. The group has been roughly stable since 2023.

What the project will not do

It is sometimes clearer to say what we refuse. Quick4Pass does not, and will not, organise tours, sell tickets, broker hotel reservations, take affiliate commission from any booking platform, accept advertising in any form, run sponsored guides, take press trips, accept comped access, or license the Quick4Pass name to any commercial business. Each has been offered at least once since 2021 — sometimes with real money attached — and refused each time. The refusals are not posturing. They are the only way an open base stays worth reading.

We also do not yet publish in languages other than English. There are good Arabic and Italian heritage resources written by people who live in those languages, and translating the base properly would need a parallel volunteer effort we do not have. If a reader wants to help translate the core guides as a volunteer, we would gladly talk; it is on the wish-list rather than the roadmap.

A short timeline

• Early 2021Four Cairo friends start a shared spreadsheet answering the questions visiting relatives keep asking.
• Mid 2021The first guide — the Egyptian Museum, Tahrir — goes online. A few hundred readers a month by year end.
• 2022The guide format settles — hours, ticket breakdown, verdict, side door, maintenance date. The base crosses sixty guides.
• 2023The project registers as a non-profit cultural association. Mahmoud joins for Luxor and Aswan; Yara joins to keep the fact register.
• 2024The base crosses one hundred guides. Reader donations cover the running fund for the first time without the founders topping it up.
• Spring 2026124 guides across 35 places, maintained on the cycle, read by something over fifty thousand people a month.

Why we keep it open

The most common question we get is why we don't simply charge a small fee and pay ourselves for the work. The honest answer is that the moment money enters, the incentives change. A paid base has to keep subscribers happy, which over time means softening the hard verdicts and chasing the popular sites rather than the worthwhile ones. A base funded by advertising has to keep advertisers happy, which is worse. A base on affiliate commission has a reason to push the bookings that pay most, not the ones that serve the reader. We have watched all three failure modes play out across travel publishing, and the only structure we trust to stay honest is the one where no one is paying us to say anything in particular.

Keeping the base open is therefore not generosity — it is the design that protects the thing that makes the base useful. The running fund is small and transparent, the volunteers are unpaid, and the guides are written by people who would walk these sites anyway because they love them. If that ever stops being sustainable we will say so plainly on the funding page rather than quietly compromising the independence. So far, it has held.