Is a Merzouga or Zagora tour better for a short trip?

On a short trip this comes down to a simple piece of arithmetic I run through with guests constantly. Zagora is about seven hours from Marrakech; Merzouga is about nine. On a 2-day, one-night window, that two-hour-each-way difference is the whole game. Zagora lets you drive down the Draa Valley, do a short camel ride, sleep in a camp and drive back without feeling like you spent the entire trip in the car. Merzouga in two days means roughly 18 hours of driving for a sliver of dune time — I'll run it, but I won't pretend it's enjoyable.

The honest catch with Zagora is the desert itself. The dunes there are small and scattered, the landscape stonier and flatter — closer to rocky hamada than the great sand sea people imagine. You still get a camel, a camp, a fire and a sky full of stars, which is lovely, but if you've come chasing the towering golden dunes from the photographs, Zagora can underwhelm. I always set that expectation before anyone books it, so the modest dunes are a known quantity rather than a letdown.

If you can possibly stretch your short trip to three days, my advice flips completely — go to Merzouga. Erg Chebbi's ~150-metre dunes are on a different scale, the camps are better, and the sunrise over that sea of sand is one of the finest sights in Morocco. The extra day is what makes nine hours each way feel worthwhile rather than brutal. So often a guest tells me they 'only have two days,' and when we look at their itinerary together we find a spare day hiding in it that's better spent on the real dunes.

So, short version for a short trip: two days and immovable, choose Zagora and enjoy it for what it is — a quick, characterful desert overnight. Find a third day, choose Merzouga every time. The desert rewards a little extra patience, and the gap between Zagora's dunes and Erg Chebbi's is the gap between a taste and the real thing.