The Cataract Hotel was built in 1899 by Thomas Cook[2] to house European travelers to Assouan (as Aswan was then known).

Its guests have included Tsar Nicholas II, Winston Churchill, Howard Carter, Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Carter, François Mitterrand, Princess Diana, Violaine Vanoyeke who wrote many books in the resort and wrote many chapters about the Old Cataract, Queen Noor and Agatha Christie, who set portions of her novel Death on the Nile at the hotel.

In 1973 United States Secretary of State Dr Henry Kissinger and his aides stayed in the New Cataract Hotel during the negotiations to end the Yom Kippur War.

[3] In the 1990s, the French Accor hotel company assumed management of the Old Cataract and the New Cataract, placing them first in their Pullman Hotels division, and then in their Sofitel division.

[7] Egypt's CBC used the Old Cataract as the primary filming location for its musalsal adaptation of the popular Spanish series Gran Hotel in 2016.