Trips To Beirut is an independent guide to the city, written and maintained by Samer Alqaisi. It is part of a network that includes Trips To The World and separate guides to Istanbul, Madrid, New York, Dublin, Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Edinburgh, Dubai, Cairo, Sydney, Toronto, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Manchester, Zagreb, Oslo and Kuala Lumpur.
What this site is trying to be
Beirut is written about in two ways, and both are useless.
One is the elegy — the Paris of the Middle East, the city that keeps rising from the ashes, the phoenix. It is a cliché that flatters visitors and tells you nothing about how to spend a Tuesday.
The other is the warning — a list of what has gone wrong, from which a reader concludes there is nothing here but ruins and risk.
This site tries to do neither. It says plainly what the safety position actually is and tells you to read your own government’s advice rather than taking a travel guide’s word for it. It explains why you must bring cash dollars and what happened to the banking system. It tells you that the most important question to ask a hotel is whether it has 24-hour generator backup.
And it treats the port explosion, the civil war and the reconstruction of downtown as things a visitor needs explained rather than as atmosphere.
What this site will not do
It will not help you visit the Palestinian camps or the southern suburbs as a sight. People live there, it is unsafe, and it is not a tour.
It will not tell you the situation is fine, or that it is hopeless. Neither is a judgement a website can make on your behalf, and both change.
How it is researched
Opening times and access come from the venue’s own source and are dated on the page. Where a price is not shown, it has not been checked recently enough to print.
Lebanon needs that caution more than anywhere else in this network. Beit Beirut is usually shut. Horsh Beirut opens and closes. The Robert Mouawad museum keeps its own hours. This site says check rather than printing a schedule that will be wrong.
Corrections are made quickly and acknowledged.
How it is funded
Advertising and some affiliate links, mainly hotel and flight search. If you book through one, the site may earn a commission at no additional cost to you.
No hotel, restaurant, tour operator or attraction has paid for a mention or a position here. No sponsored posts, no paid placements, no press trips.
Where something is not worth the money, the page says so — which is why Beirut Souks is described as an empty luxury district worth walking through for the archaeology and not the shops, and why the beaches page tells you not to swim off the city shoreline.
Photographs
The photographs on this site are not the author’s. They come from Wikimedia Commons under licences permitting reuse, and every one is credited beside the image and again at /credits/.
Corrections and contact
If something here is wrong or out of date — and in Lebanon things go out of date quickly — please say so.
The contact form goes to a person, or write to [email protected].