Augmented reality travel

When Esther Spengler walked alone out of a remote camp in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, she was in search of something more than a travel experience. For the next three days, she would hike across rocky hills and to the edge of the desert, sleeping each night under a tarpaulin, until she made it to a pre-agreed extraction point. “After having children, I kind of felt I’d lost myself and my zest for life, I guess,” she says. “But when I discovered this, it was finally like, after literally years, I felt excited about something.”

The mother of two from Austin, Texas, had stumbled across an online video for “Get Lost”, a service from the London- and New York-based travel company Black Tomato promising “the ultimate experience for helping people to disconnect, engage in the moment and push themselves”.

Its proposition sounds more like the set-up for a reality TV show than a holiday. Guests sign up without knowing where they are going, undergo a brief crash-course in survival, are dropped into the wilderness, and then must make their way out, perhaps with a few strategically placed caches of water and firewood en route. Rather than a film crew, they are trailed, discreetly, by an operations team — in Spengler’s case, an ex-British marine using a GPS tracker to remain about a kilometre away.

Though undertaken by only a small number of clients, Get Lost is an example of an emerging trend in travel. For the past decade, the industry has…