Champagne and binoculars on the Suez passage

I don’t like being separated from my passport when travelling, but I and my fellow passengers handed over our documents enthusiastically at check-in for the Crystal Serenity luxury cruise ship earlier this week.

This was probably because the person receiving them was simultaneously offering a glass of champagne, while also exchanging them for a boat pass that guaranteed two days of free food and drink, in the presence of movers and shakers from the glamorous world of global tourism.

There are worse immigration procedures.

The event was the latest gathering of the World Travel & Tourism Council, hosted this year in Egypt against the unusual backdrop of a luxury liner slowly traversing the Suez Canal.

The Council, under new chairman Manfredi Lefebvre D’Ovidio, often combines serious industry discussion with a degree of theatricality, but this was a particularly inspired piece of staging.

Tourism executives, government ministers and airline chiefs discussing the future of global travel while inching through one of the world’s most important trade arteries felt somehow appropriate.

The Serenity is part of that dwindling category of luxury travel that still believes service should be discreet, polished and almost absurdly attentive.

My port-side suite, complete with ocean-facing terrace, was equipped with every conceivable amenity. Need a pair of rather splendid binoculars to scan the maritime horizon? Standard. A cashmere blanket for sunset canal-gazing? Naturally.

The service level was equally alarming. On Serenity, the crew outnumber the passengers by a big margin, creating an environment in which your needs are often addressed before you have fully formed them yourself.

I had my own butler, Sandeep, available at the press of a button. This is not a sentence I ever expected to write, but there we are.

Sandeep appeared capable of solving almost any problem short of regional geopolitics, and, perhaps had the conference continued another day, he might have come up with that, too.

The food was predictably excellent. A four-course dinner on the opening evening merged seamlessly into a gala dinner the following night, somewhere between haute cuisine and endurance sport.

I resisted invitations to continue post-prandially into the ship’s casino, partly from self-discipline and partly because losing money on the high seas seemed a metaphor too far in the current state of the global economy.

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My fellow passengers were an eclectic group. Alongside the expected cast of tourism executives and hospitality investors were numerous Egyptian officials and cultural figures, understandably proud of their country’s latest showcase attractions.

Maybe the busiest man on board was the head of the Grand Egyptian Museum, Dr Ahmed Ghoneim, exhausted from receiving a continuous stream of congratulatory handshakes from delegates who had toured the magnificent new institution in Cairo before embarkation.

Beneath the agreeable surface of cruise-ship life, however, a serious discussion was taking place. The dominant issue hanging over the conference was the crisis in Middle East tourism in the current conflict.

Industry estimates suggest the region has been losing around $600 million a day in tourism revenues during the worst periods of disruption, while airlines were forced into thousands of cancellations and reroutings. Only now are schedules beginning to edge closer to normality again.

Which made the symbolism of the voyage powerful. The Suez Canal is not, admittedly, the glaciers of Patagonia – the only other cruise voyage I can claim, after rounding Cape Horn in style more than 20 years ago.

But the Canal possesses its own stark grandeur. A dark blue strip of water cutting through the vast whiteness of the Egyptian desert creates an almost hallucinatory contrast, particularly at dusk.

As we glided north towards Port Said, I remembered a story told to me by a friend whose family lived in Ismailia during the early 1970s. As a child, he would look east across the canal and notice tiny flashes of light glittering in the Sinai darkness.

His father explained that they were reflections from the binoculars of Israeli troops occupying the opposite bank after the 1967 war.

Sinai has long since returned to Egyptian control, and the Canal today feels entirely secure. Yet I still found myself occasionally scanning the eastern horizon through my complimentary binoculars, half-expecting to catch some distant flash in the desert twilight.

It was a reminder that in this part of the world, history never feels entirely past – even when accompanied by champagne, butler service and an excellent wine pairing for the boeuf bourguignon.

Frank Kane is Editor-at-Large of AGBI and an award-winning business journalist. He acts as a consultant to the Ministry of Energy of Saudi Arabia