I Went to One of the Wonders of the World. The Customer Experience Was Terrible..
I want to be clear upfront: I take full responsibility for what happened.
I was travelling from Nairobi to Dubai and decided, last minute, to stop in Cairo. The Egyptian Pyramids have been on my bucket list for as long as I can remember. I had no time to research properly, no pre-booked guide, and the slightly delusional confidence of a seasoned solo traveller who has winged it in more places than she can count.
I ended up in a price negotiation with a local vendor near the Pyramids, paid probably well over the odds, and told myself it was fine. I do not begrudge paying more — that is part of the reality of travelling as a tourist in markets where negotiation is expected and there is significant economic disparity between me and the person I am buying from.
What I did not expect, and could not absorb, was what came next.
What actually happened
The guide I paid for provided almost no information. I asked questions. I asked more questions. I got vague responses, redirections, and — most memorably — an offer to be his wife. What was supposed to be one of the great travel experiences of my life became something I cannot describe as anything other than deeply disappointing.
I left Egypt earlier than I had planned. The tourist money I would have spent went elsewhere.
And I have thought about it repeatedly since — not as a travel story, but as a customer experience lesson that I genuinely cannot shake.
The Pyramid principle
Here is the thing: the Pyramids of Giza are extraordinary. They are among the most remarkable structures human beings have ever built. They have been drawing visitors from across the world for millennia. No guide, no bad vendor interaction, no over-inflated price can actually diminish what they are.
And yet I left disappointed. Actively, specifically, disappointingly disappointed.
Which tells you something important about what customer experience actually is. It is not the product. It is the encounter with the product. And a poor encounter — even with something as irreducibly remarkable as a Wonder of the World — can determine how someone feels when they leave, what they remember, and whether they come back.
If that is true for the Pyramids, it is true for everything else.
The design lesson
People do not pay only for what you are offering. They pay for how it makes them feel. And if you are not thinking carefully about that — if you assume the product is good enough to carry the experience — someone else will eventually figure out how to make them feel better, and they will take their money there.
This is the most fundamental insight in customer experience, and it is the one most commonly ignored by organisations that believe their product is strong enough to excuse a poor journey.
It is not. It never is. Not even at the Pyramids.
For anyone working in customer strategy, proposition design, or the design of financial products and services: the encounter matters as much as the offering. Sometimes more. The customer who leaves having paid a fair price for something genuinely valuable but feeling unseen, confused, or dismissed — that customer does not come back. And they tell people.
Design for how people feel, not just for what you are selling them. The Pyramids will survive my one disappointing visit. Your product might not survive enough of them.