Every file the desk currently offers.

Yes. Send a note to [email protected] with the subject line "sample issue" and a postal address or email to which we can send a back-issue. We send a representative issue from twelve months earlier — current enough to be useful, old enough that the vessel positions described will have shifted. Limit is one sample per reader.

If you know the boat's current trade name, write to the desk; we will check the alias against the hull database and confirm whether that vessel is in our gazetteer, when it was last reviewed and which issue contains the current review. Most readers find this faster than searching online because the trade names rotate.

We accept reader letters and read every one. We do not publish reader reviews as factual reports because we cannot verify them; we do publish reader observations in the monthly reader-mail section, attributed by first name and country of origin only.

The reader archive remains accessible for the duration of the subscription year that was paid. After the lapse date the archive closes; the reader can re-subscribe at any time and the archive reopens with the new subscription's window of access.

No. The review queue is set by editor judgement and reader request. We have refused six paid-placement approaches in the journal's history. Each refusal is logged in the annual transparency note.

The print edition stopped in October 2021. Distribution costs and reader preference both pointed firmly toward electronic distribution. A small print run still goes to twelve Cairo bookshops as a courtesy and to a few subscribers who explicitly request it by post; this is at cost and outside the standard subscription.

The queue is set by three weighted inputs. The largest weight is reader request — vessels named in three or more reader letters within a single quarter move to the top of the queue. The second is structural significance — a vessel undergoing a refit or changing operator usually gets re-reviewed within ninety days regardless of reader request, because the older review is no longer accurate. The third is editorial curiosity — Mahmoud's reserved slot in the queue each quarter for a vessel he finds particularly interesting, often a smaller hull that would otherwise not be reviewed for years. The full queue is published in the December transparency note.

Nineteen scored criteria across refrigeration, cold-chain integrity, hand-wash facilities, ice production, oil rotation, vegetable sanitation, raw-cooked separation, water-source documentation, garbage handling and twelve further items. Hossam el-Sayyed runs the audit personally on every vessel. The score is published in the vessel review and updated annually. The audit form itself is a four-page document available to subscribers on request; we publish it as a methodology appendix every March.

No vessel is refused review. Three have been removed from the active queue because they have changed flag-of-registration to a non-Egyptian flag while still operating the Nile corridor, which raises legal-jurisdiction questions the desk does not have capacity to investigate in depth. Their names are noted in the December transparency note. Each may re-enter the queue if the registration question is resolved.

Not in the sense of corporate sponsorship — we do not accept funding from any cruise line, hotel, travel agency, river-tourism trade body or industry association, and the Mosharrafa Foundation grant terms forbid it. We do accept personal patron contributions above the institutional Captain tier — fixed at two hundred and fifty euros annually for individual patrons; this is logged in the annual transparency note and contributes around four percent of annual revenue. Patrons receive no editorial privilege; the contribution is acknowledged only by the patron's name appearing in the December contributors page if they consent.