Voyages Jules Verne - 600 Mile Nile; very low quality.

I am reviewing the VJV 600 Mile trip from Aswan to Cairo on April; 26th 2016, not the MS Hamees, the river cruiser which is administered my Moevenpik and was excellently staffed and managed. The VJV guide described himself as an Egyptologist but I suspect that component of his tourism diploma probably consisted of two days of lectures, which he skipped. I have never encountered a guide whose skills set was so inequal to the demands of his job. VJV consistently provided the minimum, penny-pinching and cost cutting where the sums involved amounted to very little, whether this is symptomatic of the low numbers of tourists in Egypt at the moment, and the diminishment of profit margins, or of their standard offering for the trip, I don't know. We were denied a trip to the Temple of Edfu on the grounds that the local carriage drivers were asking for excessively high fares and the travel companies were all not visiting the temple for that reason. However, there was one person booked on the boat via another company who was visiting the temple (we'd have all had to sit on the boat waiting for her; aka ":morning at leisure"), with our guide, by carriage, so the explanation was self-evidently untrue. We mutinied and insisted we would fix the trip for ourselves if he didn't, and the total cost for the return trip and entrance to the temple came to under £5.00 - what price goodwill?
Unfortunately, the policy of fobbing the customer off with the minimum became very much a motif of the trip to such a degree that distant sites were pointed out from a moving coach as "something I mentioned yesterday" (this was at Tel El Armarna). At Karnak Temple (the second largest ancient religious site in the world, after the Angkor Wat Temple of Cambodia), after a perfunctory lecture in full sun (these were never given on the air-conditioned bus en route), we were permitted forty minutes to see the site. As those booking such a trip tend to be well informed regular travelers with some understanding of the subject matter, such standards were universally disapproved of. An Extension in Cairo proved no better with lacklustre guiding and the exclusion of site adjacent sites which would have cost little, or nothing to visit. VJV clearly can't be bothered when it comes to their Egyptian tours if they're hiring local staff of not just such laughably inept professionalism, but manifest incompetence and dishonesty. Not to be commended. As far as I can see, there is no advantage to booking a VJV Egyptian package tour, in fact you may end up seeing less while spending more. Travel with someone else or independently.