Description and Services: 

The Windsor hotel is unique. Historically, it must be classed with the Winter Palace in Luxor and the Old Cataract in Aswan, though these hotels are five star while the Windsor only rates three. What is common in all of these hotels is that they are colonial era, but unlike, for example, the Mena House, have a decidedly European or British ambiance. While the Old Winter Palace seems of old English ladies and afternoon tea, the Windsor feels of rowdy English officers amidst a break from war.

Address: 19 Alfi Bei Street, Cairo,
Egypt.

Though the Windsor certainly does not live up to the refined, well kept reputation of other historical hotels in Egypt, perhaps this very fact insures that the ghosts of British officers sitting about the bar are a bit more visible. It is not difficult to imagine that one has passed into a different era upon entering the hotel.
 

The Windsor is a Cairo landmark. Originally, the building was a Turkish bath house of the royal families in Cairo. But for those who long to relive the days of the Shepheards Hotel, the most famous of the colonial period establishments, the Windsor was its annex. Later it became the British Officers club. In 1952 when the Shepheards Hotel was burnt, the Windsor survived with minor damage.
 

Beyond this museum called the Windsor hotel, is its friendly management and hospitable service. Guests are catered to, advised and entertained. The Doss family, which owns the hotel, seems always ready and eager to explain its history to a curious guest. Other staff members will arrange a thrifty tour to most any location in Cairo, or even make sure that a guest is not overcharged by a taxi.

The hotel is certainly faded, as any true museum exhibit might be. In the elegant dinning room hangs a painting, cracked and darkened with a large hole gouged in its otherwise unrecognizable canvas, while elsewhere a broken chandelier dangles in ruined grandeur, all relics of Egypt's revolution.