Sorry - Trip Advisor have forums for just about every destination. They ask people who know a destination very well to be a Destination Expert ( hence DE ). My DE Destination is Disneyland Paris, so that takes up a lot of my time.
So if you look on the Cairo and Luxor forums you will see DEs listed there as well.
We have been on Nile Cruise twice. both times booked with Thomas Cook. The cruise from Luxor to Aswan and return takes 6 days usually, with stops along the way for sightseeing. You leave the ship very early after breakfast and are back on board for lunch each day. Most of the cruise ships offer the same or very similar itinerary. High season with more bearable temps is October to March. After lunch you usually relax on board while sailing and maybe visit another sight later. Entertainment on board in the evenings will depend on the ship you book but most have at least one Egyptian Party Night where everyone dresses in Galabeyas ( bought from the shop on the ship, or from markets and traders ) and there is Egyptian music and dancing.
On this trip we added 3 nts in Cairo staying in the Marriott & Omar Khayyam Casino which we thought was a lovely hotel. ( I need to add a review ). We were met at the airport by a Blue Sky Tours rep named Meena ( Thomas Cook use Blue Sky in Cairo ) who looked after us very well. He checked us in at the hotel and got us Nile view rooms free upgrade.
He then sat and chatted about sightseeing, and arranged an excellent guide named Karim for us for the pyramids, sphinx, and Cairo museum which also included a buffet lunch in a restaurant on the Nile.
We had planned to just get a taxi and do sightseeing ourselves but the pyramids are about 40 mins drive from central Cairo as the city is huge. It is also quite a distance between each of the pyramids and the Sphinx so it was great having our own private minibus which stayed close by so we just hopped on and off with our guide. It would have been much harder on our own and we would have been constantly hassled by locals selling souvenirs etc. They are very persistent!
Karim took us on a tour of the Cairo museum for about an hour, then we had free time on our own. Personally I could spend all day in there, but our friends said a few hours was enough for them.
He also took us into the Solar Boat Museum at the pyramids which houses a huge symbolic restored wooden solar boat so worth seeing.
In the evening we booked Meena to take us on a night tour of Cairo which included driving and walking. They were celebrating the Festival of Eid so people were very happy and crowding everywhere. It would have been hard doing this on our own without getting lost as well.
On our second day we walked around Cairo on our own, going to the top of the Cairo Tower for fantastic views, and you can see the pyramids in the far distance. We felt quite safe walking round Cairo and the people are very friendly.
It is also definitely worth adding Abu Simbel excursion to a cruise - you fly from Aswan to Abu Simbel airport early morning and are back on ship for lunch. The two temples here built by Rameses II on the shore of Lake Nasser are amazing.
The other thing we added was the Pyramids Light & Sound show which is rather dated, but very atmospheric being on the Giza Plateau after dark and seeing the pyramids lit up. It was very chilly so we needed trousers and warm fleece/ jacket.