The annual Best City To Visit Travel Tournaments aren’t strangers to controversy despite an open voting format that hasn’t changed much over the past 6 years. Middle East politics, what actually constitutes a city, and of course, recent Romanian dominance have all been debated in various comments sections on this site.
How would you change The Best City To Visit Travel Tournament to make it better?
Format changes to city restrictions these are some of the suggestions you made recently on the foXnoMad Facebook page but I want to ask you directly what you like, dislike, would keep or change – in the comments below. As always, I appreciate the feedback that will help the BCTV Tournament be even better in 2015!
To be honest, I used to love this contest. That was about 3 years ago, when I would check out what other people were nominating, and these would then influence my decisions regarding future travel destinations.
Alas, that was 3 years ago. Now, this contest doesn’t seem to be helpful, at least for my purposes. Instead of voting the best city to travel, this contest seems to be voting which city has the most cyber-clout. I am not saying that Sibiu nor Craiova are cities not worth visiting (heck, I myself prefer off-the-beaten-path destinations over the stereotypical London or Paris). All I am saying is that perhaps they won, not because they really are the best cities to travel, but because there is a huge cyber-community that is backing their win.
Can you track where the votes are coming from? If so, I bet the votes that were for Sibiu and Craiova were hugely from Romania. I am not blaming the Romanians, more power to them if they have cyber-clout to back up their city. But what I find disappointing is that what this means is that the results of the vote don’t really reflect the opinions of the world. It just reflects the opinions of one small slice of the world. This reminds me of 4chan’s campaign to send Justin Bieber to North Korea in 2010.
Prove me wrong: if the votes that sent Sibiu and Craiova were normally distributed across the world population, then perhaps this is indeed what the world thinks. But if not, then I am afraid your contest is just being used by a subset of your readers to further their own interests. I have to say, they are smart! Some cities might not have the corresponding cyber-community to back them up. But that doesn’t mean that those are not the “best cities” to travel.
In short, I have serious doubts regarding your sampling, as I guess that they are heavily skewed. I am afraid that instead of a contest about “The Best City to Visit”, your contest is about “The Best City to Visit according to Romanians.” If you check the origins of your votes, and find that it is not the case, then I do apologize to the Romanians. But let’s see the numbers first.
Anecdotally, there are a lot of Romanians who support their cities and countries – although the same can be said about Granada, Porto, Sarajevo; respectively with regards to their own cities and countries in past years. However I do understand your perspective and have a few ideas on how to broaden the collective opinion of the contest while not excluding at the same time.
Two sugggestions: 1) I found the double CAPTCHA to be very off-putting, and 2) I think the winning city should be retired each year.
Thanks Barbara, I’ll work around the double CAPTCHA next year definitely.
I think the concept is great and I’ve enjoyed following it over the years. However, it’s got bigger every time, maybe to enter you have to submit a short piece on your own blog why you feel its the best city. Then you can justify your submission and people can look into why you decided to pick that destination. Think it will make it more personal and more interesting for the reader as well to look into the destination. This worked really well with the video competition which you did a few years, can’t remember who won that one, haha, great to see you want to keep it going but improve, keep up the great work Anil
Thanks Dave, I like the idea very much 🙂
Though I’m a bit vague on who won that video contest, I remember the winning entry was very clever 😉
My honest opinion is that the city that won in the last year should be excluded. Also I think that the people shouldn’t be allowed to vote for towns from their country. I think that another good thing would be to create multiple categories each year. For example : The town with the best beaches in 2015, The town with the best food, best arhitecture, best history, etc.
I don’t think (for example) that Bangkok can be compared with Sibiu. One is amazing when it comes to food while the other one is well known for his medieval arhitecture.
I appreciate the opinions, I’ll take them into consideration. Though I’m not sure about penalizing success however have some ideas to reduce some of the downsides of the current format.