Quick, name places in Southern Nevada that tourists love. The Strip, obviously, and Hoover Dam and its sidekick, the new O’Callaghan-Tillman Bridge, right?
Well, sometimes the strangest things will happen when you have a popularity contest and have few restrictions on how often people can vote.
Case in point: The Nevada Tourism Commission’s “Discover Your Nevada” promotion, which started as a call for nominations to find the state’s tourism gems and is making its way through a series of elimination votes.
Through an “American Idol”-style online voting process, dozens of nominated locations and events have been whittled down to a top five list in six regions. The next elimination round ends on April 30 and the top two attractions in each territory are announced. The final vote concludes May 13 with the state’s top tourism treasures scheduled to be announced two days later.
The Tourism Commission was quite clear with its voting instructions. You could click for your favorites once a day through the voting period. As a result, any tourism enterprise with a savvy social media director and a network of fans could stuff the ballot box and produce some head-scratching results.
The top five tourism treasures for Southern Nevada right now include Valley of Fire State Park and Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area — and they should be there.
But they also include Awesome Adventures Tours in Overton and Desert Adventures in Boulder City, two private companies that guide customers on outdoor excursions that include hiking, kayaking, horseback riding, mountain biking, all-terrain vehicle rides and ziplining. Incidentally, they also take customers to outdoor activities in Utah and Arizona.
Missing from the list are Hoover Dam and the O’Callaghan-Tillman Bridge, consistently one of the most visited attractions in Southern Nevada; Lake Mead National Recreation Area, which has been listed as one of the top five visited national parks in the country for years; and the Las Vegas Strip, the 4.2-mile magnet that draws millions of people to our valley.
Nothing against Awesome Adventures Tours and Desert Adventures, but they’re not the first places that come to mind when a tourist considers a trip to Nevada.
There were a few other surprises in votes involving attractions in other parts of the state. In the Nevada Silver Trails territory, people around Beatty got the word out to vote early and often. There are three Beatty-area attractions — the Goldwell Open Air Museum, the Rhyolite Historic Site and the Albert Revert Historic House — that made the top five list. Cathedral Gorge State Park near Panaca, one of the state’s original four parks and a perennial favorite, didn’t make the cut.
The Dangberg Home Ranch Historic Park in Minden and the controversial National Championship Air Races in Reno won out over the extremely popular Truckee River Whitewater Kayak Park through downtown Reno.
Maybe that was the Tourism Commission’s objective — to showcase the “hidden” treasures that don’t get as much attention because they’re overshadowed by other vastly more popular destinations. But it’s certainly hard to understand how a state agency could showcase an attraction that diverts some of its customers out of state.
Besides, everybody knew the rules going in. They were clearly communicated at the beginning of the promotion.
In general, the Tourism Commission’s mission is to publicize activities and destinations in rural Nevada — places that don’t have a Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority to tell their stories.
While Discover Your Nevada was developed as a promotion to get Nevada residents better acquainted with attractions in their own state, few people in Southern Nevada got too excited about it. Hence, the ability of a few to stuff the ballot box. As in any vote, if you didn’t participate and your choice doesn’t win, you have nothing to complain about.
There probably isn’t anything that can be done at this point. There won’t be any recounts or challenges filed to get Hoover Dam, Lake Mead and the Strip back on the ballot.
Maybe the only thing left to do is to appeal to the public to stuff the ballot box for Red Rock and Valley of Fire to take victory away from outfitters that take some of their customers out of state.