Lovely resort with excellent food and accommodation. Very professional dive centre (German run - Werner Lau). Everyone very helpful.

Easy access to some of the best diving in the Red Sea, and a pleasant pool for those surface intervals.

Be warned there is little to do here and there is only one restaurant ...

Can't wait to return

If you accept that the Oasis Dive resort is a Dive Centre with rooms attached you will love this place. .

We stayed in late January 2010 (one diver and one non diver.) There were a maximum of 9 guests at the time . The staff were friendly and helpful and spoke good English. The food was good – the breakfast buffet was a little limited, but as the catering was for such a small number of guests, this was understandable. The buffet included fresh fruit and fruit salad, cereals, toast, cut meats and cheese, and omelettes and boiled eggs.
Evening meals were a la carte – we would recommend the fried beef and mushroom sauce- and were served very promptly.

Our room was clean, with a minibar fridge (beers 2.5euro, 1.75l water 1.2euro) and a very quiet aircon unit and ceiling fan. We couldn’t work out how to get the cooling to work, but as it was cool in the evening we didn’t need it. We asked for a mosquito net after being bitten after several nights (take anti-histamine cream) and the net was fixed before we got back to the room. The hotel also gave us several cans of mosquito killer which was thoughtful. Our bathroom had a sunken floor – but beware of the level change if you visit the bathroom at night. The shower was fantastic – but sprayed all over the bathroom floor (hence the sunken floor!). The floor drain, as everywhere, was, of course at the highest point in the floor, but we got used to paddling!

Daytime temps were 28deg C and water temperature 22 deg C, although it got a bit windy and chilly in the evening – take a fleece. Please be aware the hotel is in the middle of nowhere.

The dive centre is very professionally run by Sinai /Werner Lau Divers. The staff are friendly and a mixture of German and Egyptian, but everyone spoke excellent English, and indeed English was used on all dive briefings... The dive centre prices are in Euro, but they will take other currencies. The kit is good and well maintained.

The hotel and surroundings appear to have been well designed for the ease of the dive operation. Snorkelling off the house reef was not possible whilst we were there (January) - there was a strong current running. One word of warning; the reef is a wall reef, and so you can’t snorkel from the beach over the top of it – you need to enter the water from the steps at the end of the jetty.

The diving is excellent with lots of pristine reefs – go to Marsa Abu Dababb where there is a resident colony of about 15 green turtles, and a really lovely reef with a sandy bottom.
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The pool was not heated so was a bit chilly. There is no entertainment, but after a day’s diving everyone was after an early night, so take a book to read.

Overall this is a diver’s paradise – a well run dive centre, pristine reefs, reasonable food, clean rooms and no thumping discos through the night.

The Oasis, Masra Alam.

I guess it depends what you want. The plus points are major. It is a quiet resort, no noise, silence reigns. You wake to no sounds. It is wonderful. Chambermaids don’t barge into your room, children don’t run past your room banging on the walls, a haven from all the horrors of big hotels. But the “chambermen” are, any time after 11 likely to rap on your door to give you some towels or something for the minibar. They will knock and knock till you answer, which can be a little perturbing if you are in the middle of something romantic. They do have a habit of delivering random sized sheets and towels, for example a single sheet for a double bed. This isn’t a major criticism though and if it bugs you a quiet word with reception, if you can find them, will bring people running with the right stuff.

The diving, which is why the place exists is, wonderful, amazing, fantastic, incredible, and it’s easy. They take your kit to the dive site and all you have to do is put it on, get into the Red Sea, and out again. They take it off you and get it back to the hotel. Pampered, spoilt, indulged, you bet, but who’s complaining? It’s not the place if you want deep or technical diving or other macho-man muscle flexing alpha male sort of stuff but I like 20 metres and lots and lots and lots of pretty fish. I like walls of coloured coral and short walks from the beach to the water and falling off ribs or jumping from boats. The resort has a “house reef” which it seems to me is a bit of a territorial thing to call it. Was it installed just for this hotel? Did nature put it there just for this resorts singular commercial gain? It’s a great place to do your first couple of holiday dives to get back into the swing of things, or for a last dive of the day to round things off. It’s a short trek to the pier, down a sand dune and along the beach. But the resort takes your tank down for you. All you have to do is get your kit down there, and back up the slope. A note of caution. Make sure you know what the diving will cost you. I think it’s reasonably priced but every so often they throw a googly and you get an unexpected charge.

So the place is silent, quiet, restful, tranquil. The diving is superlative. If after a day of heavy diving, or sunbathing you just want to throw some food down and fall into bed then fine. However if want something more than food of similar texture and ingredients day after day, and if you like your food reasonably well cooked you will be disappointed. The buffet, described in the brochure as adequate, struggles to achieve that modest goal. We were there 3 weeks and by the end I was getting very fed up with it. And one last F&B gripe. Why oh why can’t the place do cold drinks? Every so often a beer was delivered cold, but in the main, the ale, the soda’s, the wine was insufficiently chilled, (apart from the red wine). All I wanted was a cold beer. It would have made such a difference.

The resort is in the middle of nowhere. The town of Marsa Alam is 20+ Km down the road. They want to charge you €15 per person to go in, we got it down to €10 and arranging it was a nightmare. There’s not much there, just some basic shops. Some of the Oasis’s guests did wander to the hotel next door for a livelier evening, but it’s a 15 minute walk (at least) each way. Take a torch. Local taxis didn’t appear to be an option.

The hotel has no computers for guests use. It does apparently have wi-fi, but I didn’t have my laptop with me so I don’t know. This caused us major headaches.

One other thing to watch is a cunning little scam they pull with currency. Everything is priced in Euros and any deposit you make is in Euros too. But when you come to settle your bill at the resort the payment is converted to Egyptian pounds, a local legal requirement we were told. The rate they use to do this is definitely to their advantage. We got caught short on this because we used a Caxton Euros foreign exchange credit card. The rule seems to be, don’t expect to pay in the currency on the price list.

So if “adequate” food and a peaceful diving resort without anything to do after dinner is your idea of heaven this is it. My view, close, so very, very close but the cigars just out of reach. Having said that, it is so much better than a 500 or 1000 room hotel. You can’t have everything. The tranquillity is worth a thousand over boiled potatoes, but not necessarily more than half a dozen warm Heineken.

The Oasis has recently expanded from 30 rooms to 50 rooms, but it still has a nice small-hotel feel (unlike the other monstrosities in Marsa Alam). Sinai Divers is onsite; they're excellent and very accomodating. There's a house reef that's more of a wall, and no "sandy" beach really. My single room was nice and basic and was right above the ocean (some of the rooms are a bit further away up a hill). Beware - make sure you set up your mosquito net as soon as you check in, and if you don't have one, ask right away!! My only real "complaint" involves the food - it got a bit repetitive (I was there 9 days). If you can't stand the thought of a Sharm-style resort, The Oasis is for you.