In the two last decades of the Mubarak presidency, the Egyptian tourism industry expanded significantly, making Egypt Africa’s most-visited tourism destination: two million international visitors in 1990 become 14.7 million in 2010. The expansion was mainly a result of the opening up of the Red Sea Riviera to tourism following Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai, leading to a restructuring of the industry’s core activities from cultural tourism in the Nile Valley to Sun & Sea tourism along the Red Sea. By 2010, tourism had developed into a fundamental part of the Egyptian economy, employing four million Egyptians and allegedly feeding another twelve. Since the 1990s, government officials have talked about tourism as a catalyst for economic development, peace processes, economic liberalization and global integration. In this paper, I take these discourses about Egyptian tourism’s effects and functions as a vantage point for highlighting another type of work that tourism did in the late Mubarak era. I argue that tourism, as a multi-layered image producer, played a significant role in projecting (neo)liberal narratives and images of Egypt to the outside world, in a period when realities on the ground spoke of continuing crony capitalism and increased securitization and police control. My analysis builds on interviews with officials at the Egyptian tourism authorities and the private marketing agencies that these authorities contract, conducted in Egypt during fieldwork in 2011-2013. I also rely on close readings of promotional materials. More specifically, the paper explores some effects of Egypt’s expanding infrastructures for producing and circulating glossy and groomed images of itself. Since 1994, touristic Egypt has been marketed through Public Private Partnership. The linkage of worldwide marketing and research networks gave Egyptian actors access to extensive information about potential visitors’ travel habits and imaginaries of Egypt. I argue that these new regimes for knowing Egypt’s ‘global audience’ enabled the tourism industry and the regime to calibrate and attune Egypt’s general and touristic image worldwide to key political developments and geopolitical imaginaries. Partly this was done through direct advertisement campaigns, but also more subtle means, such as PR and news placements, were used. As a conclusion, I suggest that tourism played an integral part in the making of Mubarak’s Egypt; tourism was intimately entangled with Egyptian national and international politics, and the tourism imagery became an asset as the regime worked to gloss over and fade out undesired, challenging stories of Egypt on the world stage.