In 2024, the Louvre Museum in Paris received nearly nine million visitors, 77 percent of whom were foreign tourists. The number of visitors to the British Museum also approached nine million in 2024, with foreign visitors accounting for approximately 42 percent.
The Natural History Museum in Britain attracts nearly six million visitors annually.
Given the Grand Egyptian Museum‘s unparalleled status globally and its collection of ancient Egyptian masterpieces, its inauguration demands a momentous celebration with annual visitor numbers expected to surpass all precedents.
The opening of the GEM is an event that, if properly marketed, will surpass hosting the Olympics and the World Cup due to its unique one-time nature and owing to the world’s exceptional fascination with ancient Egyptian civilization.
Furthermore several studies – which I have reviewed in previous articles – have proven a decline economic return from hosting Olympic Games, with few exceptions, and the capital costs for countries hosting the World Cup have become greater than any tourist or marketing return.
Our Grand Museum, however, achieves its revenue from an accumulated historical value.
It also occupies a unique location next to the Pyramids, of which I have long called for transforming its surroundings into an integrated tourism economic zone with its international airport, hotels, and attractions. This aims to facilitate the state’s ability to meet all tourist needs for security, ease of transportation, freedom of shopping, discipline in services, security, full camera surveillance and so on.
The Pyramid economic zone would then become a self-contained tourist destination, minimizing the need for visitors to travel elsewhere.
In this tourism economic zone, any tourist who arrives through the nearby Sphinx Airport can obtain a single card for use in various public transportation means (updated and qualified for exclusive use in the zone).
He or she only has to pay a specific amount for that card, which they can use throughout their stay.
Of course the categories of these cards vary in terms of comprehensiveness and the validity period, which the tourist can obtain in hard currency.
Similarly, cards can be provided for entering attractions with multiple categories and validity periods.
This bypasses the need for tourists to queue to buy tickets at each tourist site, where they face harassment and extortion, or fall hostage to tourism companies – which may succeed in attracting a large number of tourists, but with very cheap agreements in exchange for medium-quality services – which limits the expansion of high-income Western tourism.
Tourist zones, in this concept, are similar to green zones, which are governed by special regulations and meet the demands of tourists that are difficult to fulfill nationwide except in the long term, after experiences expand to allow for it.
The experience of Sharm el-Sheikh in hosting the Conference of the Parties and many major conferences was successful for this reason.
I don’t see the GEM as a traditional museum – therefore, the level of services provided to visitors should not be lower than the Louvre Museum in Paris. The museum’s courtyards should not be crowded with tour guides.
Technology has enabled the development of portable devices that visitors can set to their preferred language. They only need to be in a specific location for the device to guide them with the story of the artifact they are standing in front of.
This helps mitigate the problems with disorderly human guides and avoid the risk of unauthorized guides accompanying visitors.
The museum should also contain halls equipped with IMAX technology to showcase stories from history and explain the most prominent skills, arts, and sciences of the ancients with the latest state-of-the-art technologies.
The museum’s operations should be entrusted exclusively to highly skilled and rigorously trained teams, while the most prominent trainees should sent on missions to learn from the management of major museums around the world and transfer the experience to all workers in the GEM, and even to all museums in Egypt.
The nation should prepare to host the Grand Museum’s esteemed guests, reflecting the significance of this historic opening.
For example, airline tickets from national companies should bear a logo announcing the event. Similarly, the event should be advertised through high-viewership media networks around the world.
The costs of advertising, marketing, and the celebration itself, which I believe should last for at least a week, must be covered through a fund urgently opened for subscription by potential official sponsors, provided that the subscription’s shares grant varying rights to the sponsors.
This allows sponsors to place logos in different locations and publications according to multiple categories.
The subscription fund can later be transformed into an Endowment Fund, to which the ownership of some assets and facilities of the Pyramids economic zone is transferred. It can be managed for the benefit of financing the development and management of the entire zone.
It can even extend to participate in the financial management of open attractions and the GEM, in parallel and coordination with the technical management, through the presence of fund representatives on the museum’s board of directors.
The museum, through the endowment fund, can issue revenue bonds for public subscription, with their returns guaranteed by the museum’s various revenues, including the celebrations hosted within its secure surroundings.
Author’s biography:
Medhat Nafei is an experienced economist and business leader. He served as Deputy Minister of Supply and Internal Trade in Egypt and is currently the Chairman of Arab Alloys, and holds a PhD in Economics from Cairo University.
