The period immediately prior to, during the 2011 revolution and up until President al-Sisi’s inauguration (2009-2014) was significant as a time when neoliberalism in Egypt was challenged but eventually restored in a way that relies increasingly on authoritarianism. This paper is the introduction to a project that asks how struggles around urban tourism during the 2011 Egyptian revolution not only failed to disrupt neoliberal inequalities/exclusions but played a pivotal role in shaping the current authoritarian neoliberal regime and its top-down violences. This project breaks with existing approaches to studying 1) the Egyptian revolution and authoritarian neoliberalism and 2) tourism and the urban, which have been crucial to neoliberal regulation/accumulation. It analyses them together through an approach that ‘thinks through struggle’, which centres the experiences/practices of those trying to change the world (Coleman 2021). To do so, I draw on ethnographic research on neoliberal tourism that I carried out in four critical sites of contestation in revolutionary Cairo – the Pyramids of Giza, Khan-al-Khalili Market, Garbage City and Tahrir Square – between 2009-2014. I focus on how key aspects of neoliberal tourism were contested, negotiated and reshaped through on-the-ground struggles at these four tourism sites. This study examines what alternatives to neoliberal tourism were revealed through contestations in these tourism sites, and how the Egyptian state and tourism industry responded to them in a way that shaped the authoritarian neoliberal regime that followed. At a time when authoritarian neoliberalism in the Global South is on the rise, this project contributes to understanding how struggles surrounding urban tourism play a significant role in shaping this iteration of neoliberalism, a process that entrenches coloniality through practices of racialised dispossession and cultural extraction (Tansel 2016; Axster et al. 2021).