Get lost! Safeguarding lost tourists in wilderness environments

Abstract

People lost in the wilderness may be geographically disorientated, incapacitated or unable to return to places of safety. Tourists enter wilderness environments in pursuit of pleasure and leisure but sometimes things go wrong, and they become lost. Tourists have some unique needs dependent on their attitudes, behaviours, motivations and general lack of familiarity with the environment. These unique needs have been recognised in tourism disaster management literature but have not been addressed in search and rescue or lost-person literature. This paper reviews existing literature from the fields of tourism, search and rescue, preventative search and rescue, lost person behaviour, tourism disaster management and community engagement to propose a way forward for tourist safety research. One pathway is to deconstruct the event of a person lost in the wilderness into a series of linked phases. Deconstruction can inform theorists, practitioners and stakeholders about better ways to prevent and manage such events. This could benefit all stakeholders and provide empirical research grounded in established tourism, tourism disaster management and search and rescue theories.

Waylosing and wayfinding in the outdoors: a typology of wayfinding approaches to problem-solving when temporarily lost

“…The phenomenon of getting lost in general has been described in the literature (e.g. Jonsson, 2002;Nokia, 2008;Carlson et al, 2010;Dudchenko, 2010;Ellard, 2010;Mandel, 2012;Ulrich et al, 2019), and the behaviours of lost and disoriented people in the outdoors are also described in previous literature (see for example Hill, 1998aHill, , 2011Koester, 2008;Sava et al, 2016;Schwartz, 2022;Dacey et al, 2023). Downs and Stea (1977, p. 53) provide a definition of the state of being lost: 'Orientation refers to the tie between our knowledge of the spatial environment and the environment itself, between cognitive map and real world.…”