Abstract Tourism is a labor-intensive industry that requires professional labor with important employees features to achieve high level of employee performance. Tourism industry needs employees with high level of emotional intelligence as its work involves high levels of emotional work and its employees often face situations that require high level of emotional intelligence to achieve customer satisfaction. The research aimed to study the concepts of emotional intelligence and employee performance and to know the effect of applying emotional intelligence on employees` performance in Egyptian tourism companies. Questionnaires were distributed to managers, sub-managers, leaders and employees of Egyptian tourism companies class (A) in Cairo. It was found that, emotional intelligence is important for raising employees` performance because emotionally intelligence employees can make decisions to enhance the performance by changing the behaviors in a desired manner and can enhance their negotiation skills. Consequently, emotional  intelligence has a positive effect on employee performance in Egyptian tourism companies.