The wayfinding process relationships between decision-making and landmark utility

Abstract

Wayfinding is an important aspect that should be considered by tourist park managers when allocating resources and facilities to aid tourists navigating their way through a park. This paper discusses wayfinding as a cognitive psychological process. It presents four models of the wayfinding process based on visitor levels of familiarity with the physical environment, whether the expected itinerary was pre-planned or unplanned and the spatial and temporal scales encountered in the tourist visit. The relationship between wayfinding decision-making and the roles of landmarks and cognitive map generation for each type of wayfinding process are analysed and summarised. A case study is conducted to test these four models. Wayfinding where travellers are unfamiliar with the environment but wayfinding aids are offered to travellers for a small area is the most popular type encountered in the case study. This paper highlights the need for tourist managers to understand that tourists use different methods of wayfinding and that management should provide complementary materials to assist in wayfinding. The next stage in this research will be to focus on the relationship between individual differences and wayfinding.