JUST after two o’clock this afternoon, two British Airways planes will leave Gatwick on the airline’s first direct flights to the Red Sea Riviera: one flying to the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, the other to Hurghada. Some say it is a brave move. On July 23, three bombs exploded in Sharm, killing more than 60 people, including 11 Britons.

Yet this hasn’t dampened our enthusiasm for this watersports resort, just four and a half hours away, with guaranteed warm weather, and a favourite with the Blairs who have been for several Christmas breaks. It’s so popular that the tour operator Thomson is this winter flying 15 charters a week into Sharm, up from seven last winter.

But when passengers disembark this evening, they will encounter heightened security, including vehicle checkpoints to get into the resort. The Egyptians are building a 12-mile fence around Sharm, to stop anyone entering it across the desert, the way the terrorists are thought to have come in. But while the authorities are right to crack down on terrorism, and the fence will be out of sight of the hotels, do you really want to take a holiday behind a barricade?

Thirty years ago there was nothing at Sharm but a handful of campsites for dive enthusiasts. Today the resort, consisting of Na’ama Bay and Sharm itself, has a long strip of hotels (some, including the Hyatt Regency and the Four Seasons, are excellent), and well-swept boulevards with cafés, shops and dive centres. I enjoyed my visit, accepting that the resort is excellent for watersports but pretty slim on culture.

But Sharm is already a tourist ghetto. It’s a modern concrete town and the only Egyptians here work in tourism, and most of them live in compounds behind the resort where tourists never venture. There is already a sense of “us and them”, reminiscent of the tensions surrounding some all-inclusive resorts in the Caribbean where locals and staff do not mix naturally. The fence will make this contrast more stark. There is also the practical concern that if Sharm is fenced off, terrorists may target nearby resorts such as Nuweiba, Dahab or Taba — the latter was bombed in October 2004, killing 34 people.

Two weeks ago I helped to judge the First Choice Responsible Tourism Awards (winners will be announced in Times Travel next month). We found the most successful projects provide communities with income, respect and a sense that tourists are guests who visit on an equal footing with locals, rather than simply expecting a slice of Western comfort in a tropical setting. Such encounters help to knock down any metaphorical fences between cultures rather than build them up. Creating resorts where locals and visitors are well integrated in the first place is ultimately the way to overcome the “us and them” divide that afflicts resorts such as Sharm.

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