Four editors. One Heliopolis office. Six years of ticket comparisons and review cards on Egyptian heritage.

How the company is structured

QPass Museum Cards & Reviews L.L.C. is a domestic Egyptian limited-liability company registered at the Cairo Commercial Registry under number 462981 and with the Egyptian Tax Authority under registration 195-738-426. The legal form is a four-shareholder L.L.C. with equal equity splits between the four working editors. There are no outside investors, no advisory board with equity, no parent holding company, and no consultancy or services agreements with any tourism-sector business. The structure is deliberate and is, as best the desk can tell, the only one that allows the editorial rules in section three of this page to be enforced without rationalisation.

The office is on the third floor of a small building on Cleopatra Street, a residential-commercial mix street in central Heliopolis. Heliopolis is the kind of district where engineering offices, small media operations, accountancy practices and dental clinics share the same building landings. The location is operationally useful: twenty minutes by taxi to Cairo International Airport, forty minutes to the Egyptian Museum on Tahrir in light traffic, fifty minutes to the Grand Egyptian Museum, ninety minutes to Saqqara, and an hour and a quarter to the train station for the Alexandria connection. The east-side traffic is consistently lighter than the downtown grid, which matters for an editorial team that walks into museums and out of them four times a week.

The financial model is straightforward. There are three subscription tiers — Open Pass (the full card archive, online only), QPass Plus (the archive plus a printed half-year visit-letter and the seasonal supplement), and Editor's Pass (the previous tier plus a half-year planning-hour exchange with an editor and the Cairo backstop call). Revenue is split roughly into thirds: editorial salaries take just over half, field travel and the printer take a third, and the website, the accountants and the rent take the rest. There is no funding round planned and no expectation of taking one.

The editorial rules

The publication operates under six standing rules. They are the rules that decide which assignments are taken and which are refused. Following them costs the publication money. We think they pay back in subscriber trust over time, and trust is the only currency a heritage-review publication actually trades in.

1. Verify on the ground. Every card is based on a visit by one of the four editors within the previous three months for major-site cards and twelve months for smaller-site cards. The internal visit log is available to a subscriber who writes asking about a specific card.
2. Buy the ticket. Editors visit as ordinary visitors. We do not accept press passes, comped admissions, organised familiarisation trips or VIP access. The cost of every visit is on the publication.
3. No commission, no affiliates, no resales. There is no link in any card that pays QPass when a reader books or buys anything. Tour operators, ticket resellers, hotels and cruise companies have no financial relationship with the publication.
4. No advertising. The site carries no display advertising, no native advertising, no sponsored cards. The printed visit-letter carries no inserts.
5. Correction within the working week. Reader-flagged corrections appear at the top of the affected card within a working week, named and dated. The print visit-letter carries the cumulative correction column from the previous quarter.
6. Independence from the season. Cards do not soften during the high tourist season. If a site is unpleasant in August, the card says so in August. If a popular supplement is overpriced, the card says so even if a competing publication recommends it.

The four editors

QPass is four working editors. We do not have separate marketing, business-development or growth functions because we do not have those functions. The team composition has been stable since the fourth quarter of 2022, when Nadia joined. Cards are signed at the bottom with the responsible editor's initials.

What the company will not do

It is sometimes more useful to say what we refuse than what we do. QPass does not, and will not, organise tours, sell tickets, broker hotel reservations, take affiliate commission from any booking platform, accept advertising in any form on the site or in the printed visit-letter, take press trips, accept comped access to any site, syndicate cards to third-party blogs for SEO purposes, license the brand to a tour operator, or accept any funding from a tourism-sector source. Each of these has been offered to the desk at least once since 2020 and refused. The refusals are not principled posturing — they are the only way the cards remain useful to subscribers.

We also do not currently publish in any language other than English. Translating QPass would mean opening a parallel editorial operation with the same standards in a different language, which the current scale does not support. An Arabic edition is in the open discussion file for 2027 but is not a commitment.

A short history of the publication

The first card was the Egyptian Museum on Tahrir, published 9 November 2020 to about eighty subscribers, all of whom were direct contacts of the founders. By the end of the first year there were twenty-four cards and around 320 subscribers. The format settled at its current shape during the third quarter of 2021 — the ticket comparison opening, the verdict line, the side-door tip, the rotation date. By the end of 2023 the archive had crossed seventy cards and the publication was paying salaries (modestly) for the first time. The current archive count as of the spring 2026 rotation is 118 cards across 36 sites and institutions.

• October 2020The founding conversation between Kareem and Reham. The card format is sketched in a Heliopolis café over three meetings.
• November 2020L.L.C. registered with the Cairo Commercial Registry. The first card, the Egyptian Museum, is published 9 November.
• Q3 2021The card format settles at its current shape — ticket comparison, verdict, side-door tip, rotation date.
• March 2022Sara Abdelmaksoud joins to take the Theban and Nubian beat. The first Luxor cards are published.
• Q4 2022Nadia Tantawy joins to run fact-checking. The corrections workflow is formalised.
• 2023The printed half-year visit-letter is launched. The Editor's Pass tier opens.
• 2024The hundredth card — the Grand Egyptian Museum after the public-opening rotation — is published. The website is moved off shared hosting.
• Spring 2026The archive holds 118 cards across 36 sites. The spring rotation is the twenty-third complete cycle.

Why the format works

The QPass card format is not a stylistic choice. It is a design decision driven by where the cards are actually read — most of our traffic loads on a mobile phone in the last twenty minutes before the reader walks into the museum gate or the temple entrance. The reader does not have time for a thousand-word essay; they want to know whether the Seti I supplement is worth EGP 1,400, whether to buy the camera ticket at the main till or the side desk, and whether the combined Karnak-Luxor ticket actually saves money on a two-day Luxor stop. The cards answer those questions, with the rotation date stamped on every entry so readers know how fresh the information is.

The most common subscriber feedback the desk receives is that the cards saved subscribers an hour or a queue at a major site. That is the working definition of value for the format. We do not publish historical essays, we do not publish cultural commentary, we do not publish anything that would be better written by an Egyptologist or a literary essayist. We publish the practical decision-support information that an adult visitor needs, dated, signed, and rotated on a schedule that the desk publishes openly. The format is narrow on purpose; the narrowness is what makes it usable.