The period surrounding the 2011 Egyptian revolution (2009-2014) was significant as a time when neoliberalism and authoritarianism Egypt were challenged but eventually restored in a way that relies on intensified ‘neoliberal authoritarianism’. This paper focuses on struggles around urban tourism during the Egyptian revolutionary period, which contested neoliberal inequalities. These inequalities resulted from three decades of local neoliberal reforms in the context of broader neoliberal globalisation and Egypt’s longer history of evolving authoritarianism (Bogaert 2013). This paper asks the following: how did contestations surrounding urban tourism not only fail to disrupt neoliberalism and authoritarianism in Egypt but also play a pivotal role in shaping this new adaptation of neoliberal authoritarianism? To answer this question, I break with existing approaches to studying 1) the Egyptian revolution and neoliberal authoritarianism and 2) urban tourism. I analyse these issues together through an analytical framework which centres the experiences/practices of those contesting exclusionary neoliberal projects (Bogaert 2018; Montesinos-Coleman 2021). I use this framework to study materials I generated through an ethnographic study of resistance to neoliberal tourism conducted immediately before, during and after the Egyptian revolution (2019-2014) in four critical sites of contestation – the Pyramids of Giza, Khan-al-Khalili Market, Garbage City and Tahrir Square. I identify key aspects of neoliberal tourism revealed through contestations at these four tourism sites during the Egyptian revolution. These include precarity; the transnational reproduction of commodified nationalism; neoliberal environmentalism; and the neoliberal co-optation and domestication of revolutionary practice. Contestations at these tourism sites at the time reveal the workings of neoliberal tourism, helping us understand what neoliberal tourism is – its conditions, outcomes and alternatives possibilities – in the context of how it operates and is negotiated on the ground in Cairo. I look at how these contestations provoked various responses from the Egyptian military and security apparatus, government officials, the news media and tourism industry, which shaped the character of the neoliberal authoritarian regime that followed. In so doing, I offer unique insights into how neoliberal authoritarianism in Egypt is shaped through struggle and was entrenched despite contestations through tourism in Cairo. At a time when authoritarianism in the Global South is on the rise, this paper contributes to understanding how struggles surrounding urban tourism play a significant role in shaping this more neoliberal iteration of authoritarianism in Egypt, a process that entrenches coloniality through practices of racialised dispossession and cultural extraction (Axster et al. 2021).