Red Sea Diving Safari’s resort at Marsa Shagra has built an excellent reputation (and a bit of hype) over the years as a dedicated diver’s resort. If you want to cram as much diving as possible into a single trip, you generally have two options: a liveaboard or a resort with a house reef.

Given the current state of liveaboards in the Red Sea, resorts may be the best (and certainly the safest) way to dive. Fortunately, Marsa Shagra boasts one of the best house reefs in Egypt.

Red Sea Diving Safari

Red Sea Diving Safari (RSDS) operates three resorts along the southern Egyptian coast: Marsa Shagra, Marsa Nakari, and Wadi Lahami. Marsa Shagra is the original, the largest, and the closest to the airports at Hurghada and Marsa Alam.

As the name suggests, this is very much a diver’s resort. The entire setup is designed to make diving as easy and enjoyable as possible. It’s best described as no-frills—and that’s not meant as an insult.

Diving is centred around the beachfront dive shade. The covered area includes all the essentials: showers, rinse tanks, and a drying area. You’re issued a locker on arrival, allowing you to store your kit. From there, it’s a 5m walk into the sea—it’s the best shore diving setup I’ve seen.

Most guests opt for the five-dive-a-day unlimited house reef package, so all other diving comes at an additional cost. Fortunately, the pricing structure is clear and available at the time of booking—unlike some resorts where it quickly becomes opaque.

The house reef is a major selling point, but a less obvious highlight is the jetty and selection of fast RIBs. This setup offers huge flexibility in dive trips, minimizing wasted time and pre-dive admin. Kit up at the dive shade, carry your gear 50m to the boat, and you can be back from Elphinstone in under two hours.

The result is a varied dive schedule that lets you tailor each day. There can be up to four different time slots to dive a particular site.

Booking additional dives is done via a few taps on a self-service touchscreen in the dive centre. It’s generally a slick system, though the only downside is the lack of a summary view showing which trips are busy or underbooked. Since many trips require a minimum headcount, I really wanted to see an overview rather than opening each trip individually.

That said, it’s a minor gripe—staff were always happy to provide the full picture, and I never booked onto a trip that didn’t go ahead.

Diving Highlights

The resort is ideally located for many of the southern Red Sea’s top sites. Dolphin House, Abu Dabab, and Elphinstone are all within easy reach, alongside an array of excellent local shore dives. You can literally see the liveaboards moored at Elphinstone from Marsa Shagra’s beach.

Marsa Shagra House Reef

My goal for this trip was to really get to know the house reef at Marsa Shagra—spend as much time on it as possible and see it through different stages of the day. In the end, we did nine dives on it! Fortunately, it’s a fantastic dive, and as a photographer, being able to move at your own pace is a real treat.

The house reef effectively consists of two sites: north and south. There are several ways to dive them: enter and return from shore, be dropped by zodiac and return to shore, or be dropped and collected by zodiac.

The best profiles seem to be when dropped in by zodiac. Starting farther from the entry/exit point makes for a quieter experience, and the marine life appears to be at its best.

The reef is a great dive. You can see the full range of Red Sea marine life: blue-spotted rays, parrotfish, Napoleon wrasse, surgeonfish, and octopus. If you’ve dived in the Red Sea before, it’ll feel familiar—but being alone on the reef makes the experience more intimate and allows you to really absorb its detail.

In my opinion, the best time to dive it is in the morning. The reef hugs the shoreline, running north to south, so you get the best light before the sun moves overhead and casts it into shadow.

Elphinstone

One of my all-time favourite dive sites. Surrounded by deep water, this narrow reef is about 400m long and runs roughly north to south. It features steep vertical walls on each side and gradually deepening plateaus at both ends.

The draw of Elphinstone is the combination of a stunning Red Sea reef with a good chance of seeing pelagics in the blue. Our dives focused on the northern plateau, and we were lucky—on our second dive, two hammerheads emerged from the blue at 30m. The encounter lasted only a minute, but it was unforgettable.

From Marsa Shagra, it’s about a 20-minute boat ride to the reef. RSDS uses various boats (RIBs) depending on group size. They vary in comfort—one in particular (the red-hulled one) wasn’t well-trimmed and gave a very slappy ride, even in relatively calm conditions.

Shaab Abu Dahab 4

I love being surprised. I assumed this would be a lazy filler dive after an action-packed dive at Elphinstone, but it was absolutely fantastic. The site is a relatively flat coral garden interspersed with large pinnacles rising 7m from the bottom.

The reef has some of the most striking soft corals I’ve ever seen.

Eco Village

Marsa Shagra is an all-inclusive resort styled as an eco village. Accommodation ranges from safari-style tents with shared bathrooms to various levels of chalets. We stayed in one of the mid-tier Deluxe Chalets. It was perfect for our needs: A/C, en suite, and a bit of space outside to sit and watch the sun go down with a beer. None of the accommodation is fancy, but like everything else with RSDS, it’s functional and well thought out.

Soft drinks are included in the all-inclusive package, but alcoholic drinks cost extra. Both are readily available from a small hatch near the beach.

The buffet restaurant serves good quality, familiar Red Sea food. If you’ve been on a liveaboard, you’ll recognize the style: flatbreads, rice, chickpeas, and plenty of aubergine. It’s not gourmet, and there isn’t a huge variety (don’t expect themed nights), but it’s reliable, well-made, and perfect for refuelling after a day’s diving.

Getting There

Marsa Shagra is 250km south of Hurghada, which translates to about a 3-hour drive on Egyptian roads. Our transfer, provided by RSDS, was straightforward. Our driver met us promptly at the terminal exit and whisked us away in a comfortable car.

TUI and EasyJet offer direct flights to Hurghada from most major UK airports. We flew with TUI and were pleasantly surprised. TUI also offers an extra 5kg baggage allowance for certified divers (just present your certification). One tip: go to a manned check-in desk, as the allowance isn’t available at automated bag drops.

The only real downside of getting to Marsa Shagra is the lack of direct flights to Marsa Alam. One of the usual benefits of diving in Egypt is the short travel time, so the long transfer is a definite hit to convenience.

I booked this trip through Oonasdivers and it cost £1,555 based on two sharing. This included flights, transfers, full-board accommodation in a deluxe chalet and a 5 day unlimited house reef dive package.