Landmarks in tourist wayfinding: a review

Demographic trends project a significant expansion of European urban populations to 2030, leading to expanding cities being marketed as desirable tourist destinations, particularly for short city breaks. In turn, this renders the promotion of efficient, effective and satisfactory visitor wayfinding experiences as potentially lucrative to regional visitor economies, a point reflected in current UK government tourism policy. This paper reviews key outcomes from multidisciplinary research into wayfinding behaviours and acquired spatial knowledge in unfamiliar large-scale urban environments, placing emphasis on the importance of landmarks. The rationale is that understanding the relationships between wayfinding and the features of the urban built environment facilitates informed design of potential built interventions. For this purpose, those studies involving virtual urban environments are reviewed to assess the role of landmarks as aids to navigation. In addition, given the emphasis on visual access to landmarks, issues impacting on tourists who are visually impaired are addressed. Implications for interventions in urban areas for tourists are considered.