Best Swim-Up Rooms in Sharm El Sheikh (2026)

One Sharm El Sheikh resort keeps 99 swim-up rooms, which is the number that separates this city from the rest of the Red Sea: here your dates decide whether you get one, not the inventory. Five Sharm resorts have confirmed swim-up categories, rates open at £90 a night all-inclusive, and all five sit within 15 minutes of SSH airport – a tighter radius than Hurghada manages.

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Every rate above is board-inclusive, so you are comparing whole days rather than room nights – and the whole page spans £40, from £90 to £130. Money is not the deciding factor here, and neither is the transfer: the furthest of the five is 15 minutes from arrivals. What actually separates them is who they let through the door and how much water is on the property.

Which Sharm El Sheikh swim-up room should you book?

Book Steigenberger Alcazar. It carries the strongest guest rating on this page, and it is the only property in Sharm that publishes a swim-up count: 99 rooms across two confirmed categories. Everywhere else on this list a single category sells out and your dates are dead there. At £130 all-inclusive it is the highest rate here, and the premium buys the one thing that is genuinely scarce in this category – availability.

Check Steigenberger Alcazar dates – December to February is Sharm's winter-sun peak, and Alcazar's heated pool is exactly why its swim-up rooms clear first in those weeks.

Four alternatives, each for a specific reason. Watching the rate, or landing late: book Xperience Sea Breeze Resort at £90, 4.9 km from the runway. Traveling without children: book Cleopatra Luxury Resort Sharm Adults Only, the only 18+ property here. Want a high-rated all-inclusive at a mid rate: book TUI MAGIC LIFE Redsina. Want premium drinks and an aqua park included: book Rixos Premium Seagate.

Steigenberger Alcazar

This is the pick, and the argument is a number nobody else on this page can match: 99 dedicated swim-up rooms. Two categories are confirmed on the Booking.com room list, both with "Swim Up" written into the room name – the Superior Room Swim Up and the Deluxe Family Swim Up, which is the one that takes a family rather than a couple.

Why that matters more than it sounds: at a typical Red Sea resort the swim-up tier is a handful of ground-floor rooms, so a popular week closes the category outright and the property drops off your shortlist. With 99 of them, Alcazar stays on it. If you are booking late, or booking for four people, this is the address most likely to still have the room you actually want.

The second argument is seasonal. The pool is heated in winter, which turns October to April – Sharm's best months for the Red Sea – into a straightforward swim-up booking rather than a gamble on a cool evening. The resort sits in Nabq Bay, 15 minutes from SSH, and is part of the JAZ Hotel Group, whose all-inclusive food and drink program is the stronger end of the Egyptian market.

One honest note on the room itself: the swim-up terraces here sit behind an enclosed security gate, so the layout is slightly less open-plan than a terrace that simply runs into the water.

Book this one if you want the best-rated swim-up room in Sharm and the best odds of getting it. Check Steigenberger Alcazar availability now – and confirm the words "Swim Up" appear in the room name on your reservation, not just "pool view".

TUI MAGIC LIFE Redsina Sharm El Sheikh

Redsina is the value pick, and it is the closest thing here to Alcazar's quality at £30 less. The category is a single one, listed on Booking.com as the Swim UP Room, and the property is another JAZ Group resort – the same operator behind the top-rated hotel on this page.

The guest scores are the argument. It is rated highly across staff, cleanliness, comfort and value at once, which is rarer in a large all-inclusive than a single strong headline number suggests. Five restaurants cover Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, Italian and international, and there is a water park and a full evening entertainment program – which is the flip side of the same coin. This is a resort that puts on a show every night; if you want silence, Cleopatra is your page.

Nabq Bay puts it 5 km from SSH, the shortest transfer of the two Nabq properties here. Worth knowing before you search: the hotel still appears under its earlier Magic World Sharm name on some booking platforms, including in its own Booking.com URL. Same property, same rooms.

Book this one if you want a high-rated all-inclusive swim-up room without the Steigenberger premium. Check TUI MAGIC LIFE Redsina rates.

Cleopatra Luxury Resort Sharm Adults Only

This is the only property on this page where the adults-only policy covers the entire resort at 18+, not a designated wing or a quiet pool. That is the product, and everything else follows from it: no kids' club timetable, no water park, no queue at the slides.

The category is the Swim Up Room, a beachfront layout whose terrace steps directly into the pool. Board is all-inclusive, the beach is private Red Sea frontage, and Naama Bay is the one location here you can actually walk out of – the waterfront restaurants and dive centers are on foot rather than by taxi, which no other resort on this list offers. It is 10 minutes from SSH.

At £110 it costs £20 over the entry rate on this page, which is a small premium for the only genuinely adults-only address in the city.

Book carefully, though. There is more than one Cleopatra-branded resort in Sharm, and the adults-only one is a distinct listing – the property you want is the one carrying the "Adults Only" descriptor and the Aquarium naming in its booking URL. Book this one if you want the swim-up room without anyone else's children in the pool. Check Cleopatra Adults Only rates.

Xperience Sea Breeze Resort

Sea Breeze wins on two things at once, which is unusual at the bottom of a price list. It is the cheapest confirmed swim-up room in Sharm at £90 all-inclusive, and at 4.9 km from SSH it is the closest swim-up hotel to the runway in the city – a short taxi rather than a coach transfer, which matters on a late arrival or a one-week trip.

It also has the most water. Nine pools sit on the property, alongside a private coral beach with direct views of Tiran Island across the strait, and the house reef here is one of the better snorkeling entries in the Sharm area – you swim to it rather than book a boat. Two swim-up categories are confirmed: the Swim-Up Room and a Honeymoon Offer (Upgraded to Swim-Up Room), which is the second-widest choice of layouts on this page.

The trade-off is location character. Sharks Bay is a reef bay, not a strip – there is no walkable restaurant scene the way Naama Bay has one, so evenings out mean a taxi.

Book this one if you want the lowest rate, the shortest transfer and the best snorkeling. Check Xperience Sea Breeze rates.

Rixos Premium Seagate

Seagate is the most comprehensive board on this page, and it costs the same as the cheapest. The Swim-Up Room sits inside the Rixos Ultra All-Inclusive concept, which means all food, premium-brand drinks, entertainment and aqua park access are in the rate rather than charged on top – at £90 a night, level with Xperience Sea Breeze and £40 under Steigenberger.

For a family that combination is hard to argue with. The aqua park is on site, the beach is private, and the ultra all-inclusive removes the running cost that quietly doubles a resort week when drinks and activities are extra. The resort is 15 minutes from SSH.

Set expectations on atmosphere rather than quality: a resort built around an aqua park is busy by design, and the swim-up terrace here is part of a large, active property, not a retreat from one.

Book this one if you are bringing children and want the final bill to match the room rate. Check Rixos Premium Seagate rates.

Sharm El Sheikh or Hurghada for a swim-up room?

They are 45 minutes apart by plane and they sell two different things.

Sharm's argument is depth and proximity. Five confirmed properties sit inside a 15-minute radius of the airport, one of them holds 99 swim-up rooms, and the entry rate is £90 all-inclusive. If your constraint is "we want a swim-up room, these are our dates, and we do not want to spend the first afternoon on a coach", Sharm answers it better than anywhere else in Egypt.

Hurghada's argument is range at the top. Its five spread from 2.2 km out to a 30-minute drive down to Sahl Hasheesh, and they start at £200 rather than £90 – but the top of that range goes further than Sharm's does, with a butler-service suite tier, a suites-and-villas-only ultra all-inclusive, and heated pools for a January booking.

So: Hurghada if you are shopping the premium end, Sharm if you are shopping availability and short transfers, and the Egypt hub if you want the two side by side. Outside Egypt, Antalya is the Turkish coast running the same all-inclusive playbook. And if what you actually want is water nobody else swims in, that is a private pool villa in Sharm El Sheikh rather than a swim-up room – a different category, held to the same terrace-into-the-water test as everything on the swim-up rooms hub.

When to go

October through April is the season here. The Red Sea holds 22–24°C, daytime air sits at a comfortable 25–30°C, and underwater visibility is at its best – which matters in a city where the reef is the reason half the guests came.

December to February is the winter-sun peak, driven by European travelers escaping the cold, and it is the window where swim-up rooms clear earliest. It is also the window where Steigenberger Alcazar's heated pool stops being a footnote and becomes the deciding feature.

May through September is very hot – 35–40°C by day, with the sea topping out around 28°C. The swim-up terrace becomes shade management as much as recreation, though rates soften outside the school holidays. Sharm gets year-round sun and almost no rainfall, so the weather risk in any month is heat, never a washout.

What to do beyond the pool

Sharm's reefs are the reason the resort strip exists, and they are worth leaving the pool for. The Ras Mohamed and White Island day is the one most people book – Egypt's oldest national park, two snorkeling stops, and an hour on a bare sandbank with no shade on it. Tiran Island runs the opposite direction into the strait, on better-known reefs and more exposed water.

For something that fits around a pool day rather than replacing it, parasailing gives eight to ten minutes at 50 m for about £12, and the Seascope semi-submarine covers the reef in 90 minutes without anyone getting wet.

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