Back in early October I wrote a post criticizing the New Open World Corporation and their New 7 Wonders of Nature campaign. Now that the winners have been announced, there has been a fire storm of posts and articles popping up, questioning the intentions of that competition.

In case you missed it the provisional winners are the Amazon, Halong Bay, Iguazu Falls, Jeju Island, Komodo, Table Mountain and Puerto Princesa Underground River.

 

Whether those winners are worthy or not doesn’t really matter, as it really is too bad that nobody seemed to pay attention months ago when countries were trying to pull the plug on their entries. Perhaps this is a better late than never situation.

Representatives from 11 of the 28 finalists went to a late-September event in Korea to support the competition. The event was held on Jeju Island. I wondered, in my last post, how many of those 11 representatives would become eventual winners of the competition, seeing as how multi-million dollar event and promotional tour requests had been coming from the New 7 Wonders organizers. It seemed to me that participants at this event may have had a better chance at winning, since they presumably had paid to attend the event, and may be looked upon favourably by Bernard Weber and his associates.

Well, of the seven winners, only the Philippines and Peru were not among those 11 representative countries on Jeju Island in September. Those are some pretty big odds that 6 of the 11 participants in that event would end up winning 5 of the 7 New Wonders of Nature.

To put it in numbers, each of the 28 finalists should have had a roughly 3.5% chance of winning. So, realistically, 39% of the winners should have come from those participants, yet they accounted for 71%. That is a huge discrepancy. Yes, those numbers may exaggerate things, but what it boils down to is that it would have been normal for those participants to win 3 of the 7 natural wonder spots, not 5 spots.

After writing my article I had media and interview requests come in from Israel, South Africa, Canada and Indonesia. Now that the winners have been announced, mainstream media is picking up on the controversy and a number of other posts have popped up echoing the sentiments I wrote about in October. Here are a few links to other posts from people in the travel writing and blogging world.

Gary Arndt wrote a post called “The Absurdity Which Is The New7Wonders of Nature“, in which he questions many of the winners and hails the voting process as a joke. I agree with pretty much all of what he says. Like me, he also skipped visiting Jeju Island when he was in South Korea, because it just wasn’t so interesting. One thing that came to mind reading his post was that ‘natural wonders’ seems too broad a label. It’s an odd mix of geological formations like Table Mountain and ecological anomalies like Komodo Island.

Matt Long took what is perhaps the most diplomatic approach at the competition, admitting that all the winners deserve the attention, but perhaps others were even more deserving. What I liked most about his post “Reaction to the New Seven Natural Wonders of the World” was that he pointed out that travellers are inherently biased. He thought the Dead Sea and Uluru should have been winners, because he’d visited both destinations. This brings out one of the major flaws of the competition, in that they are getting people to vote who’ve never been to, or seen, most of these Wonders.

Michael Hodson wrote the most entertaining post I’ve seen so far. His words literally echo what I wrote last month, bringing up the questionable financial demands and unethical business practices of the organization running the competition. He does make some pretty bold personal conclusions, but vows to dig deeper into the issues and uncover what the real story is with the New Open World Corporation. Be sure to read his post titled “New 7 Wonders of the World: The Scam behind the Sham” and watch for more updates from him.

My main issue with these competitions boils down to transparency. No third-party has verified the votes and nobody knows where the millions of dollars go that have been paid to the organizers. It would be great to hear from the winning Official Sponsor Committees themselves how much money they paid. It would also be great to know how much the winners might have to pay to use the official title of ‘New 7 Wonders of Nature’.

How Could this Competition have been Credible?

This all could have been avoided quite easily too.

Public voting is a necessary evil, to generate interest and word-of-mouth conversation. The power of social media undoubtedly helped boost the volume of votes for this competition and I fully support letting the public have their fun and narrow down the pool of candidates. But why not give the public three years, instead of four? Then turn it over to the experts.

The 28 finalists of this competition were announced in 2009. They were still slightly controversial, but with the likes of famous sights such as the Galapagos Islands, Great Barrier Reef, Angel Falls and the Grand Canyon you could argue it had more than enough worthwhile, and believable, natural wonder selections to choose from.

From here, the people at the New 7 Wonders campaign should have turned control of the competition over to the experts.

There is a reason that a large number of travel competitions have a public / expert split in their judging criteria. Companies often use public votes to create a pool of finalists from which experts choose winners. Or they weight public votes as a fixed percentage of the final outcome, with expert ratings weighing in the remainder. This is common for photo contests, writing contests and travel contests you’ll find online.

If they had given the list of 28 finalists to a global panel of naturalists and earth science experts (people who study nature, such as geologists) the results may have been different. Letting those experts decide on each finalist using a set of criteria, similar to how UNESCO decides on new World Heritage Site listings, to decide the eventual winners would have boosted credibility for the campaign and eliminated most of the controversy.

Even if the organization is making millions of dollars off of this competition, having reputable experts factor in on the final decision could have been enough to be viewed as a legitimate campaign.

I look forward to seeing how everything turns out, as right now there are still a lot of unanswered questions.