lost tramper in Paparoas

Sorry Wayne. Yes you are correct. I'm usually hiring a PLB so of course try take my intentions. But per examples above there are lots of places to leave intentions. Practically zero real excuses not to.

@SianS yes but the French website is a pain to use (doesn't work on mobile, and crashes often), I only update it about every year to say in which country I will be, and if I will be mostly tramping or cycling, and yeah not really an alternative to leaving intentions, as if you are unable to trigger the PLB no one will come looking for you. As I said, my previous attempts to leave intentions with DOC/visitor centres have been unsuccessful. Nowadays I only do weekend trips but yeah the problem was there when I was travelling and I guess most people travelling long term have the same problem: even if they wanted to leave intentions they don't have any practical way to do it.

Yah. As Wayne said. New Zealand doesn't let you leave intentions with any (official) authority, as far as I know. PLB registration is all about providing contact people who can be called to *get* intentions and info about your skills and intentions. That contact information just goes into a list, and the people and numbers you provide will usually be called before anything else if a signal's received from your PLB. The entire system in NZ is built around expecting you to take responsibility for leaving intentions with another trusted person chosen by you (who should probably also be a contact person for your PLB), without any involvement by authorities. Strictly speaking people should probably be doing this anyway, with or without a PLB. It doesn't have to be someone in New Zealand, or someone who has the slightest understanding of where you're going. They just have to be contactable, and understand and be trustworthy in the capacity of being able to raise an alarm with NZ Police if you don't check in with them as arranged, and provide the info you've provided to them on demand. For anyone who doesn't have someone they trust to raise an alarm and hold intentions, there are at least a couple of independent service providers in New Zealand which can act as a trusted contact. Adventure Buddy and Safety Outdoors to name the two I'm aware of. They'll take your intentions (Safety Outdoors charges a fee), and react as appropriate in notifying emergency services and providing the info they hold, if they don't hear back from you. http://www.adventurebuddy.co.nz/system/ http://safetyoutdoors.com/ I haven't tested either of these services and can't vouch for them. Adventure Buddy is an approved provider of NZ's AdventureSmart website. Safety Outdoors doesn't seem to be. DOC used to take intentions in a very fragmented way at some sites but not others, which was causing DOC heaps of resourcing problems, constantly chasing after people, at certain sites, who'd simply not bothered to sign out and then vanished. It also risked being confusing for people who used it as to whether anyone was going to follow up or not if they didn't sign out. DOC has never been mandated to babysit trampers with the funding it receives and has mostly gotten out of that business now, which doesn't bother me personally except that it wasn't handled very well when it suddenly pulled the plug.

cant remember which service it was, there was a service like that that claimed to send out notifications if you didnt check in and it failed.... you'd want to setup a test message to yourself to make sure a service like that works

Some time ago there was website called RoughPlan (it no longer exists), that was thrown together by three people in the NZ Alpine Club. Maybe it was this? It was primarily a tool for assisting trip planning: emails, mapping a route, digital whiteboards for scribbling notes where everyone could see them, food and gear list planning and divvying up, transport planning, and all that sort of stuff. It *did* also include a feature where you could nominate a contact, and the site would send them an email or text message at a particular time if you'd not returned and checked in with the site. In that case, I don't think it was ever intended to *replace* the role of a trusted contact in taking responsibility for reporting a party overdue. As with everything else the site did, it was just meant to be there to assist them. Given how the site didn't seem very active for much of the time, I'd not be surprised if that feature didn't work reliably. The people who created the site eventually handed it over to an ISP. It ran for maybe another year or two, then shut down. The concept and the amount of effort that had gone into it was really cool, but I'm also not familiar with anyone specific who used it for real trip planning, perhaps because most people who might use it already had systems in place that they were already using. There may have been a few users in the NZAC.

tried adventure buddy signup, it expects at least four people in teh party with contact nos it wouldnt accept any cell phone no's i put in... couldnt complete.... requires a lot of compulsory fields to be filled out specifically, couldnt complete a logon without posting a trip intention, not much use

Interesting. Maybe you could flick a note to Don and George and let them know of the issues. It seems to be a fairly informally run operation, and they might react well to constructive feedback.

well their testing doesnt look very good in the first place, i had so many fields that it wouldnt accept its very fussy on phone no's won't accept the + sign, no gaps, none of the no's i used it would accept just an error it would take up to 20 digits, demanded i fill out phone no's for 4 contacts, demanded a landline no which not everyone has, won't accept a cell no in the landline no field... etc etc...

I don't think any intentions system that aims to activate a search if someone doesn't check in by their panic time / date works unless someone who cares about the possibly missing person is in the loop. Partly as the trusted person is a presence advocating for the trustworthiness of the missing person, partly as if you leave intentions with someone you care about, you'll care about not screwing them around massively if you forget to sign back in in time and they go to police and persuade them to institute a great wild goose chase. If someone started an intentions website where people could leave intentions and trigger a search if there is no subsequent sign in, there's going to be pretty high rate of wild goose chases initiated. I would think the creators of it are going to give up on the idea pretty quickly.

Yup and websites… don't work when you don't have coverage ;) So it's even harder to sign out when you can't even get a call through. I don't mean to say that there is perfect solution somewhere, just that I don't have a solution. The best solution would be to have something that you don't have to care about, like something that would use your facebook/twitter/whatever account, and send an alert after X days if you didn't connect anywhere, but I don't think that's actually possible (they don't give access to that data to third-parties).