Why an Italian desk keeps returning to Camel

Italian dive media has a long Sharm memory. Marco Daturi’s 2018 ScubaPortal piece is a return letter: he had already tried other houses, already stayed at Camel more than once, and booked it again without thinking hard about the flight. The hotel and the centre were the decision. The airline was not.

Four years away, and boat and hotel staff still used his name — and his wife’s, and his son’s. He treats that as the opposite of a resort wristband. The operational argument is the jetty a few hundred metres from the rooms, not a transfer to the main port. For a reader who has done both, that sentence is the article.

A hotel that is not a resort

Daturi dislikes all-inclusives that sit miles from town. Camel’s pitch, in his telling, is a small hotel in the middle of Naama Bay: walkable, quiet enough, Italian-friendly. Water at 28 degrees and air at 30 are the climate notes, not a weather ad.

The piece is eight years old as of this journal. Boats, menus, and training agencies move. The jetty-and-memory argument is why the brief still earns a card. The original Italian/English page is the record.