Safety Management and Operational Challenges in Adventure Tourism Businesses

Abstract

Adventure tourism businesses operate in environments characterized by substantial physical risk, highly dynamic natural conditions, and rising customer expectations. As demand for adventure tourism grows, operators must continuously balance experiential delivery with effective risk management and operational control. This study investigates safety management practices among adventure tourism operators in Norway. Data were collected via an online survey of 89 commercial adventure tourism businesses. Results show that environmental conditions—particularly rapidly changing weather—represent the most commonly perceived risk factor, followed by client behaviour, including failure to follow instructions. Slips, trips, and falls constitute the most frequently reported injury type. Tour guide competence emerges as a central safety management strategy. Collectively, the findings underscore the crucial role of tour guides as frontline safety managers and illustrate how small adventure tourism operators in Norway maintain robust safety systems within the constraints of limited resources. The study contributes to the literature on business management in high-risk service sectors and provides practical insights for strengthening safety management practices in adventure tourism.

1. Introduction

Adventure tourism has become one of the fastest-growing segments of the global tourism industry (Swarbrooke, 2003; Wengel, 2021; Farkić & Gebbels, 2022). The sector itself is primarily driven by increasing demand for nature-based and experience-based travel (Buckley, 2010). Typical activities that we relate to adventure tourism—such as rafting, climbing, kayaking, glacier hiking, mountaineering, and many others—will, in most cases, attract visitors that are seeking activities that include physical engagement in natural environments. Lately the stimulation coming from the emotional involvement has become increasingly important as well. As adventure tourism activities are done almost exclusively outdoors, they inherently involve varying degrees of physical risk and environmental uncertainty (Cater, 2006; Bentley & Page, 2008). This creates managerial challenges for adventure operators, since they continuously deliver experiences that are perceived as both adventurous and emotionally engaging while having to maintain operational safety and risk control (Cater, 2006). New research also suggests that safety in adventure tourism is more and more co-produced through the interaction between operators, guides, and tourists. In particular, this applies to activities characterized by environmental uncertainty and high levels of participant involvement (Li et al., 2026). Adventure operators therefore continuously need to balance experience design and production with adaptive decision-making. While this seems to be somewhat contradictory, it does firstly place significant responsibility on business, and secondly on tour guides as well—to identify hazards, implement safety systems and maintain operational oversight (Bentley et al., 2010; Morgan & Fluker, 2006).

Some of the previous research (Haegeli & Pröbstl-Haider, 2016; Morgan & Dimmock, 2006; Gstaettner et al., 2018) has focused on safety management practices in adventure tourism operations from different aspects; however, we can see that research is primarily done in countries where adventure tourism represents a significant part of the general tourism economy. For example, two studies from New Zealand and Australia (Bentley & Page, 2008; Bentley et al., 2010) have shown that most incidents within commercial adventure tourism involve relatively minor injuries, with slips, trips, and falls representing the most common injuries (Bentley et al., 2010). While the aforementioned studies provide valuable insights into incident patterns and operational risks, there remains limited understanding of how adventure tourism operators manage safety in dynamic environments.

Norway provides a particularly relevant context for exploring these issues, as nature-based and adventure tourism have become increasingly important components of Norwegian tourism development and the national tourism strategy focused on sustainable destination development, regional value creation, and nature-based experiences (NOU, 2023; Innovation Norway, 2021). A large variety of activities such as sea kayaking, rafting, mountaineering, and glacier guiding attract domestic and international visitors with widely varying levels of outdoor experience and physical capability. Norwegian adventure tourism operations take place in environments often characterized by steep terrain, cold-water fjords, glaciers, and rapidly changing weather conditions. These environmental factors simultaneously create the appeal of adventure tourism and the central operational challenge of ensuring safety for all participants.

Despite the importance of safety management in adventure tourism, research examining how adventure tourism operators organizationally manage and adapt to risk remains relatively limited. Existing research has primarily focused on accident patterns, injury monitoring, environmental risk, and tourist risk perception (Bentley & Page, 2008; Bentley et al., 2010; Gstaettner et al., 2018). Comparatively less attention has been directed toward the organizational and operational processes through which safety is produced in everyday practice, particularly within small adventure tourism firms operating in highly variable natural environments. There is therefore a need for research that integrates organizational safety theory, resilience perspectives, and adaptive management approaches with the practical realities of adventure tourism businesses (Hild et al., 2023; Røkenes et al., 2015).

To address this gap, this article draws on an integrated theoretical framework combining High-Reliability Organization (HRO) theory, Safety-I-II and Resilience Engineering, and Naturalistic Decision-Making (NDM). Through these perspectives we can highlight the central role of tour guides as frontline safety managers whose tacit knowledge, situational awareness, and adaptive decision-making are key components in operational reliability within dynamic environments. By applying these theoretical frameworks to the Norwegian context, the study contributes to a deeper understanding of how safety is enacted in adventure tourism and how small firms balance formal systems with real-time adaptation.

This paper further examines how Norwegian adventure businesses manage safety and operational risk under conditions of environmental uncertainty. Drawing on High-Reliability Organization theory, Safety-II and resilience engineering, and Naturalistic Decision-Making theory.

In short, this paper explores how formal safety systems, expertise among guides, and organizational learning interact within small adventure tourism firms. The study contributes to management research by conceptualizing adventure tourism operations as low-redundancy reliability systems in which operational safety emerges through adaptive capability rather than formal compliance alone. Practically, the findings offer actionable insights for adventure tourism operators and policymakers seeking to design safety systems that account for the realities of small-firm operations in dynamic natural environments. Academically, the study advances theoretical integration by demonstrating how HRO theory, Safety-II, and Naturalistic Decision-Making can be applied collectively to adventure tourism contexts—an approach not previously attempted in this literature.

Summed up, the aim of this study is to examine how Norwegian adventure tourism businesses perceive, organize, and manage safety under conditions of environmental uncertainty. The study is guided by the following research questions:

RQ1: How do Norwegian adventure tourism businesses perceive and manage operational risks?

RQ2: How do formal safety systems and guide competence contribute to safety management?

RQ3: How are organizational learning practices related to safety management structures?

2. Literature Review

2.1. High-Reliability Organizations

Adventure tourism organizations, in most cases, operate in an environment exposing them to natural elements and potential rapid changes in the conditions (Morgan & Dimmock, 2006), with a very limited tolerance for any errors. This is what defines this environment as a high-risk environment. By applying High-Reliability Organization (HRO) theory (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007), we can understand how such organizations aim for consistency when it comes to safety despite very fluctuating environmental conditions. HROs are significantly characterized by their preoccupation with failure, sensitivity to operating conditions, deference to expertise and very high levels of commitment to resilience (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007; Reason, 1997). It is these very principles that allow us to understand why organizations in other business segments such as aviation, maritime services, emergency response, nuclear power plants, and so on invest significant amounts of time and money into developing practices that help them detect even the smallest anomalies as early as possible, thus giving them enough time to escalate concerns soon enough that the expertise given to people working in these organizations helps them make decisions rapidly when required.

By applying the HRO style of thinking to adventure tourism organizations, we can highlight both the similarities as well as the differences. As with typical HROs, adventure tourism organizations must maintain awareness of latent hazards (e.g., weather shifts, unstable terrain, …) and cultivate situational awareness across the operation. The most obvious difference is the size of the operation; any of the traditional HROs you can think of are typically multilayer organizations, sometimes with multiple redundant systems to ensure safety (Sutcliffe, 2011). On the other hand, adventure tourism organizations are, in many cases, just small organizations that are heavily resource-constrained. These organizations often run by owner–operators that combine tour guiding, logistics, marketing and safety responsibilities (Bentley et al., 2010; Morgan & Fluker, 2006) into one person; at best we would see smaller teams often supported by a seasonal labour force. It is this very size of organization that reduces bureaucratic redundancy and often removes formal oversight, while shifting all the burden of reliability onto an individual tour guide.

This brings along two significant implications. Deference to expertise in adventure tourism is not just an abstract principle as we see in traditional HROs, it is instead more of a practical necessity as tour guides’ judgement on the go can often override the standardized plans when environmental or weather conditions demand so. The second significant implication is seen in how staff are being trained. If traditional HROs are characterized by significant formal training along with incident-reporting infrastructure training, in the case of adventure tourism, on the other hand, we see significantly more informal mechanisms such as peer learning, on-the-job mentoring and real-time communication. Empirical studies in related contexts (Haegeli & Pröbstl-Haider, 2016; Gstaettner et al., 2018) show that small organizations in adventure tourism compensate for limited systems of formal training by creating and nurturing a very tight organizational culture with tight operational routines and strong interpersonal dependence and trust amongst their staff.

Looking specifically at the Norwegian (HRO) perspective helps explain why adventure tourism businesses invest heavily in practices that strengthen environmental detection, situational awareness, and adaptive response capacity. Operations conducted in steep terrain, cold-water fjords, glacier environments, and rapidly changing weather conditions create contexts in which relatively small misjudgments or overlooked weak signals may escalate rapidly into serious incidents (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007; Haegeli & Pröbstl-Haider, 2016). At the same time, HRO theory highlights the vulnerabilities associated with limited organizational redundancy. Unlike larger high-reliability sectors, many adventure tourism businesses operate with small teams and limited backup systems, making operational reliability heavily dependent on frontline guide expertise and adaptive decision-making (Sutcliffe, 2011). From a resilience perspective, long-term systemic reliability therefore depends not only on individual competence, but also on the organization’s ability to preserve, share, and transmit tacit operational expertise across guides, organizations, and in some cases across the wider sector (Hollnagel, 2017).

2.2. Safety I Safety II and Resilience Engineering

Traditional safety management—often labelled Safety-I—focuses on preventing adverse outcomes by identifying hazards, enforcing compliance, and eliminating deviations from prescribed procedures (Hollnagel, 2018). These contributions historically have dominated organizational safety management across high-risk sectors and are identified by standardization, centralized control, procedural oversight, etc. (Ewertowski & Kuźmiński, 2024). This approach supports many different regulatory frameworks and formal safety systems. It has been proven effective in reducing certain classes of error. In adventure tourism, the Safety-I measure includes checklists, equipment standards, certification requirements, and incident reporting protocols (Bentley et al., 2010; Morgan & Dimmock, 2006).

We must understand that Safety-I has a very limited effect in adventure tourism. It can be the weather, terrain, client behaviour or a mixture of all three that gives unpredictable amounts of variations in scenarios that cannot be fully covered by the rules and regulations upon which Safety-I is based. This adventure tourism is much more dependent on Safety-II and Resilience Engineering, where the entire focus shifts from preventing adverse outcomes to enabling success in variable conditions (Hollnagel, 2017; Provan et al., 2020). The goal is simple, through Safety-II and Resilience Engineering we aim to ensure that both people and systems can adapt so that “things go right” (Hollnagel et al., 2015; Dekker, 2014). We can see resilience being additionally enhanced through the flexibility, improvisation, and capability of tour guides to reorganize resources and plans in response to ever-changing events around them.

In practice, Safety-II reframes operational practices in adventure tourism by shifting the focus from seeing deviations as problems to recognizing them as adaptive responses. These are guided by the expertise of tour guides themselves and very often these are the mechanisms that help tour guides maintain safety during the tour. Examples of this could include route changes, the rearrangement of packing, on-the-spot client reassignments and many more; these are not just rule violations but can be interpreted as resilience strategies when weather changes or group dynamics shift for whatever reason. Haegeli and Pröbstl-Haider (2016) have done research in an outdoor—mountain context, where they have documented how experienced tour guides routinely adapt plans to manage both exposure to the environment as well as maintain what are called “acceptable” risk levels.

For Norwegian operators, a Safety-II orientation has several practical implications. Formal safety systems need to be designed in ways that support adaptive capability rather than constrain it. This requires investments in guide training and organizational learning processes that develop professional judgement, scenario recognition, and decision making under different conditions (Hollnagel, 2017; G. A. Klein, 2017) It also requires communication structures that enable rapid information flow and operational coordination during constantly changing environmental situations.

From a resilience perspective, procedures should provide operational guidance while still allowing flexibility and professional discretion in the field (Provan et al., 2020). Consequently, effective regulation in adventure tourism may depend less on rigid standardization alone and more on balancing prescriptive safety requirements with recognition of the adaptive expertise required in dynamic natural environments (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007).

2.3. Tacit Knowledge and Naturalistic Decision Making

The final third theoretical pillar upon which we are anchoring our research is the area of tacit knowledge and naturalistic decision-making. We see this as a mechanism that links together HRO imperatives with Safety-II adaptation in adventure tourism. Tacit knowledge—or silent knowledge, as it is also called—is a mixture of experienced-based know-how (Venkitachalam & Busch, 2012) that professionals gather over time while repeatedly encountering specific situations. In most cases it is very hard to explicitly define tacit knowledge; however, its importance for experts cannot be underestimated (Howells, 1996). Adding the Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) research (G. A. Klein, 2017), and specifically the Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) (G. Klein, 2014) model, to this shows that experts make rapid, effective decisions by recognizing patterns, mentally simulating outcomes, and selecting workable courses of action without exhaustive option comparison (G. A. Klein, 2017).

In adventure tourism, tour guides very often rely on their tacit knowledge (Hild et al., 2023), seeing cues—subtle changes in wind, odd cloud formation, difference in snow texture, or changes in group dynamics—to anticipate hazards and adjust operations. These judgements and decisions are often made by the tour guide under time pressure, with a lack of complete information, as well as with high stakes for customer safety. Morgan and Dimmock (2006) noted that tour guides that can recognize patterns and mental situations have the capability to foresee likely developments. This gives them the possibility to enact pre-emptive measures such as route alteration, client reallocation or even trip cancellation if needed.

Tacit knowledge is transmitted through personal interaction (Senker, 1993), socialization (Miton & DeDeo, 2022), stories (Linde, 2001), apprenticeship (Diller, 1975) and reflective practice (Ravanal Moreno et al., 2021). We must understand that tacit knowledge has this characteristic of resisting full formalization, and thus, organizational strategies that focus solely on written procedures will always fail to capture this knowledge; this becomes even more critical when we are talking about safety practices. This means that training programs that focus on scenario-based training, mentorship programs, and focused practical training are always more effective at creating the environment where the adaptive capacity that Safety-II demands will flourish. For Norwegian operators, whose environments present rapid and sometimes extreme variability, cultivating tacit expertise among tour guides is therefore a central safety investment.

An important implication of this finding concerns how organizations can assess whether guides possess the adaptive capabilities required to operate safely in highly variable environments. While certifications and formal qualifications remain important indicators of technical competence, they provide only limited insight into a guide’s ability to recognize subtle environmental cues, anticipate emerging hazards, and adapt plans when conditions change unexpectedly. From a Naturalistic Decision-Making perspective, expertise is demonstrated through the ability to make effective decisions in complex and uncertain situations rather than through procedural compliance alone (G. A. Klein, 2017). Similarly, research on adaptive expertise suggests that competent performance in dynamic environments depends on the ability to apply knowledge flexibly across novel situations rather than simply following established routines (Barry & Collins, 2021).

For adventure tourism operators, this suggests that the assessment of guide competence should extend beyond certification requirements and include opportunities to observe decision-making in realistic operational settings. Scenario-based training exercises, supervised field practice, emergency simulations, mentoring arrangements, and structured post-activity debriefings may provide valuable opportunities to evaluate how guides interpret environmental information, communicate with participants, and adjust operational plans when conditions change. Such approaches are consistent with Safety-II thinking, which emphasizes the importance of understanding how successful performance is achieved under varying conditions rather than focusing exclusively on procedural compliance (Hollnagel, 2018). Given the dynamic nature of Norwegian adventure tourism environments, the ability to adapt effectively may therefore represent one of the most important indicators of guide competence and organizational resilience. Finally, adventure guiding in dynamic natural environments requires adaptive expertise, situational judgment, and the ability to respond effectively to rapidly changing conditions (Barry & Collins, 2021).

2.4. Previous Research and Development of Survey Variables

The questionnaire in this study was developed by combining variables commonly used in previous adventure tourism safety research with concepts derived from High-Reliability Organization theory, Safety-II, and Naturalistic Decision-Making research. Particular emphasis was placed on operational risk factors, organizational safety systems, guide competence, and learning processes, as these themes have consistently emerged in previous studies of safety management in adventure tourism and other high-risk operational environments. Table 1 summarizes the main variable groups included in the survey and their theoretical foundations.

Table 1. Main variable groups included in the survey and their theoretical foundations.

Variable Group	Variables Included in Survey	Theoretical/Empirical Basis
Operational Risk Factors	Weather conditions, terrain hazards, drowning risk, extreme temperatures, environmental hazards	Bentley and Page (2008); Bentley et al. (2010)
Safety Management Systems	Risk assessments, safety audits, emergency procedures, equipment maintenance	Morgan and Dimmock (2006); Bentley et al. (2010); Weick and Sutcliffe (2007)
Guide Competence and Preparedness	Training, certifications, emergency preparedness, adaptive decision-making	G. A. Klein (2017); Barry and Collins (2021); Hild et al. (2023)
Incident Reporting and Organizational Learning	Near-miss reporting, injury reporting, incident investigations	Hollnagel (2018, 2017); Weick and Sutcliffe (2007)
Organizational Characteristics	Staffing structure, organizational age, activity profile	Jennings (2010); Veal (2018)

3. Materials and Methods

3.1. Research Design and Data Collection

This study employed a quantitative cross-sectional survey design to examine safety management practices and operational challenges among Norwegian adventure tourism businesses. Survey research is commonly used in tourism and organizational studies to explore perceptions, operational practices, and management systems across geographically dispersed organizations (Jennings, 2010; Veal, 2018).

The sampling frame was obtained from the Norwegian Brønnøysund Register (Brønnøysundregistrene, 2023) and consisted of limited companies (AS) registered under NACE code 93.291, Opplevelsesaktiviteter. At the time of extraction, this registry-defined frame included 515 registered limited companies. From this frame, 150 companies were randomly selected and invited to participate in the survey by email.

A total of 94 questionnaires were returned. Five questionnaires were excluded because more than 30% of responses were missing, and this number is without a doubt substantial (Dong & Peng, 2013), resulting in a final analytical sample of 89 companies. This corresponds to a usable response rate of 59.3% and final sample coverage of 17.3% of the sampling frame.

Participation was voluntary, and respondents completed the questionnaire anonymously. The survey focused on operational safety management, perceived risk factors, incident patterns, guide competence, organizational preparedness, and reporting practices.

In total, 94 complete questionnaires were returned. Following data screening and quality assessment, five responses were excluded due to substantial missing data, resulting in a final analytical sample of 89 adventure tourism businesses.

3.2. Survey Instrument

The questionnaire was put together in three main sections. The first section collected information about the business, including ownership status, staffing structure, business size, years in operation, location, activity types, and number of clients. The second section focused on safety management activities and practices, including the reporting and investigation of client injuries and incidents, safety procedures, risk management systems, emergency preparedness, and safety audits. The third section focused on client injuries and perceived causal factors, including minor, serious, and fatal injuries recorded during the previous 12-month period.

Serious injuries were defined as injuries requiring hospitalization, fractures, serious lacerations or burns, or near-drowning incidents. Minor injuries were defined as cuts, bruises, and other injuries not requiring hospitalization. Further, respondents were asked to identify the most frequent incident types and perceived causal factors, including client-related, task/equipment-related, physical-environmental, and management/organizational factors.

The questionnaire was adapted primarily from Bentley et al. (2010) and adjusted using Morgan and Dimmock (2006) and Bentley and Page (2008) and by theoretical perspectives related to High-Reliability Organizations and resilience engineering (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007; Hollnagel, 2017). This resulted in minor adjustments to reflect the Norwegian adventure tourism context and additional items concerning safety management practices.

3.3. Data Analysis

Since our questionnaire was designed to capture organizational practices and incident-related information rather than latent psychological constructs measured through multi-item scales, exploratory factor analysis or confirmatory factor analysis was not considered appropriate.

Therefor our analysis is based on descriptive statistics and cross-tabulation analyses in order to identify patterns in safety practices, reporting routines, and organizational preparedness.

The data were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics version 31.0.0. Initial analyses consisted of descriptive statistics used to identify dominant operational risks, common incident types, and safety management practices among Norwegian adventure tourism operators.

To further explore organizational relationships within the dataset, exploratory cross-tabulation analyses and association tests were conducted between selected variables related to formal safety systems, guide competence, emergency preparedness, and incident reporting practices.

The exploratory nature of the study and the relatively limited sample size made us choose an exploratory statistical approach for identifying patterns and relationships within this under-researched population according to suggestions from the literature (Field, 2018; Stebbins, 2001). The analytical approach was informed by the study’s theoretical framework combining High-Reliability Organization (HRO) theory, Safety-II and resilience engineering perspectives, and Naturalistic Decision-Making (NDM) theory (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007; Hollnagel, 2017; G. A. Klein, 2017).

Before analysis, the dataset was screened for missing data. Five questionnaires were excluded because more than 30% of responses were missing. There was no imputation procedures applied.

3.4. Ethical Considerations

Participation in the study was voluntary and anonymous. No personally identifiable information was collected from respondents, and all data were analyzed at an aggregated organizational level. Respondents were informed about the purpose of the study prior to participation, and completion of the questionnaire was interpreted as informed consent to participate in the research. The study followed general ethical principles for social science research involving voluntary participation, confidentiality, and informed consent (Bryman, 2016).

4. Results

4.1. Organizational Characteristics of Norwegian Adventure Tourism Businesses

The investigated organizations represent a diverse range of Norwegian adventure tourism companies operating primarily in nature-based environments. The randomized sample is primarily small and medium-sized businesses with relatively flexible staffing structures including full-time, part-time, and seasonal employees, where the full timers are often the owners. While several operators employed only a few permanent staff, some of the larger organizations reported considerably larger staffing structures, resulting in a variation across the sample. The findings reflect the diverse organizational structure of Norwegian adventure tourism operations.

Further, the respondents primarily occupied senior organizational positions within their businesses. More than half of the respondents were chief executive officers (56.3%), while 26.3% were owners of the business. Additional respondents held administrative roles (8.8%) or worked as senior guides (7.5%). Respondents had worked within their organizations for an average of 10.3 years, indicating substantial familiarity with organizational operations and safety management practices. The relatively senior positions of respondents increase confidence that the survey responses reflect informed assessments of organizational safety management practices.

As seen in Table 2, Norwegian adventure tourism businesses are generally small organizations. The findings indicate that many operators rely heavily on seasonal and part-time labour. This is important to know when trying to understand how safety management is organized within the sector, as smaller staffing structures often force organizations to rely on frontline staff and tour guides.

Table 2. Descriptive statistics for participating adventure tourism businesses.

Variable	N	Mean	SD	Min	Max
Full-time equivalent employees	59	10.86	23.19	0	120
Full-time employees	82	5.11	15.11	0	90
Part-time employees	67	10.79	20.32	0	140
Seasonal workers	64	8.08	19.51	0	140
Establishment year	77	1985.56	19.25	1917	2006

The operators represented a broad range of adventure tourism activities. As shown in Table 3, the most frequently reported activities included natural climbing (29.2%), nature hiking (28.1%), team-building activities (27.0%), river kayaking (23.6%), rappelling (23.6%), skiing activities (23.6%), and sea kayaking (19.1%). A large proportion of operators also reported various “other” nature-based activities (40.4%), illustrating a broad operational diversity characterizing Norwegian adventure tourism businesses, rather than a specialized population.

Table 3. Types of activities run by Norwegian adventure tourism businesses.

Activity	Percentage (%)
Natural climbing	29.2
Nature hiking	28.1
Team-building activities	27.0
River kayaking	23.6
Rappelling	23.6
Skiing activities	23.6
Sea kayaking	19.1
Outdoor education/camps	19.1
Canoeing	18.0
Rafting	15.7
Freshwater fishing	14.6
Artificial climbing	13.5
Mountain biking	11.2
Other nature-based activities	40.4

4.2. Operational Risk Environment

Environmental conditions represented the dominant category of perceived operational risk among Norwegian adventure tourism operators. As shown in Table 4, unpredictable weather changes were identified as the most significant operational challenge (32.6%), followed by risks related to drowning (16.9%) and dangerous terrain exposure (12.4%). Additional operational risks included dangerous environmental conditions such as falling rocks (7.9%) and exposure to extreme cold or heat (7.9%).

Table 4. Main environmental risk factors reported by Norwegian adventure tourism operators.

Activity	Percentage (%)
Unpredictable weather changes	32.6
Risk of drowning	16.9
Dangerous terrain	12.4
Dangerous environmental conditions (e.g., falling rocks)	7.9
Extreme cold/heat exposure	7.9
Strong sun exposure	1.1
Insect bites	1.1

Note. Percentages reflect operators’ identification of dominant environmental operational risks.

The findings illustrate that Norwegian adventure tourism businesses operate in environments characterized by multiple interacting environmental hazards rather than isolated risks. Weather conditions, terrain exposure, and water-related risks appear to create operational situations that require constant situational awareness and continuous adaptation during activities.

4.3. Safety Management Practices

The findings shows that Norwegian operators implement a combination of formal safety systems and practical operational safety measures. As presented in Table 5, guide and staff safety training represented the most widely implemented safety management practice among participating organizations (83.1%). Equipment maintenance procedures were similarly common (82.0%), suggesting strong focus on preventive operational safety.

Table 5. Safety management practices implemented by operators.

Safety Practice	Operators Implementing (%)	Interpretation
Guide/staff safety training	83.1%	Guide competence strongly prioritized
Equipment maintenance	82.0%	Preventive safety focus
Hazard identification/control	53.9%	Operational risk monitoring
Formal emergency procedures	43.8%	Moderate formal preparedness
Safety audits	33.7%	Formal organizational oversight less common
Incident investigation/analysis	49.4%	Organizational learning unevenly implemented

At the same time, more formalized organizational safety structures such as hazard identification systems (53.9%), emergency procedures (43.8%), incident investigation practices (49.4%), and safety audits (33.7%) were implemented less consistently across the sector. This may indicate that while many organizations emphasize practical operational safety, more systematic organizational safety management structures are still developing within parts of the industry.

4.4. Incident Reporting and Organizational Learning

The findings additionally reveal variation in incident and near-miss reporting practices among participating organizations. As shown in Table 6, serious injuries were relatively consistently documented (78.7%), while near misses (39.3%) and minor injuries (37.1%) were recorded substantially less frequently.

Table 6. Incident and near-miss reporting practices.

Reporting Practice	Organizations Reporting (%)	Interpretation
Near misses formally recorded	39.3%	Near misses underreported
Minor injuries formally recorded	37.1%	Minor incidents inconsistently documented
Serious injuries formally recorded	78.7%	Serious incidents more systematically documented

These findings may suggest that many organizations rely more heavily on informal adaptation and operational experience than on systematic organizational reporting systems. While serious incidents appear to trigger formal documentation practices, smaller operational disruptions and near misses may remain more dependent on informal communication and tacit organizational learning.

4.5. Relationships Between Safety Systems, Guide Competence, and Organizational Learning

To further examine how safety is organizationally managed within Norwegian adventure tourism businesses, exploratory analyses were conducted between selected variables related to formal safety systems, guide competence, preparedness practices, and reporting culture.

The analyses revealed several statistically significant relationships, presented in Table 7. Organizations conducting formal safety audits were significantly more likely to report near misses and incidents than organizations without audit practices (p = 0.031). Similarly, organizations implementing formal emergency procedures demonstrated significantly stronger near-miss reporting practices (p = 0.007).

Table 7. Relationships between safety systems, guide competence, and organizational learning.

Relationship Examined	Statistical Result	Interpretation
Safety audits ↔ Near-miss reporting	p = 0.031	Organizations conducting audits were more likely to record near misses
Emergency procedures ↔ Near-miss reporting	p = 0.007	Formal emergency systems associated with stronger reporting culture
Safety audits ↔ Risk assessments	p < 0.001, φ = 0.434	Formal safety practices clustered together
Guide training ↔ Emergency procedures	p = 0.004, φ = 0.307	Guide competence associated with organizational preparedness

A strong relationship was also identified between organizations conducting safety audits and those performing formal risk assessments (p < 0.001, φ = 0.434), indicating that formal safety practices tend to cluster together within certain firms. Furthermore, guide and staff training were significantly associated with the presence of formal emergency procedures (p = 0.004, φ = 0.307), suggesting that organizations investing in guide competence also appear more likely to invest in structured preparedness systems.

Taken together, the findings indicate relationships between guide competence, organizational preparedness, reporting culture, and formal safety structures among Norwegian adventure tourism operators.

The exploratory analyses provide additional support for the interpretation of safety as an organizationally distributed and adaptive process. Operators with stronger formalized safety systems also demonstrated stronger reporting practices and preparedness structures. This suggests that formal systems may contribute less through the direct control of operational variability and more through enabling organizational learning and coordination. At the same time, the relationship between guide training and emergency preparedness indicates that frontline expertise and organizational structures are mutually reinforced rather than opposing approaches to safety management.

5. Discussion

Through our research we have confirmed that adventure tourism businesses are organizations that operate in very specific conditions—these are heavily labelled by high variability of environmental conditions, low levels of redundancy and significant dependence on knowledge and experience of front-line employees. Dominant challenges identified by Norwegian operators include hazardous environmental conditions, terrain specifics, risk of drowning and possible extreme weather conditions. These findings can be interpretated in line with High-Reliability Organization (HRO) theory, where we can see how relatively small deviations or small signals missed can escalate into serious risk and also consequences (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007).

There is a substantial difference between traditional HROs that operate in traditional HRO sectors such as aviation, healthcare or offshore operations, and Norwegian adventure tourism businesses. While the former ones most commonly operate with multiple redundancy systems, large organizational structure and strict organizational oversight systems, this is not the case in Norwegian (or really any other) adventure tourism businesses due to a very simple reason—the size of the operation. As we can see in the descriptive findings, the size of these organizations is relatively small as they rely heavily on seasonal staffing structures. This is the reason why operational reliability depends heavily on the competences of front-line employees—the tour guides. Their situational awareness and very adaptive decision-making are crucial for the reliability of the processes that are being caried out.

In this sense, our study extends the HRO theory into the field of small businesses—in this case, small tourism businesses especially. By putting adventure tourism operators that are characterized as low-redundancy reliability systems in this context we can show that adaptive expertise can compensate for limited formal structures. Instead of heavily bureaucratic redundancies, safety emerges through ongoing monitoring of the environment, interpersonal cooperation and coordination, as well as front-line operational adaptation.

In light of the concept of Safety-II, as well as resilience engineering perspectives, our results support the research that was done by Hollnagel (2017) and Provan et al. (2020) that indicates that adaptive capability also has a strong importance for safety, possibly being as important as compliance with procedures.

Across all operations, environmental uncertainty has emerged as the biggest operational challenge indicated by the operators, this clearly indicates that safety management in adventure tourism is not capable of relying on pre-set standardized procedures and strictly defined plans. Ultimately it is the role of tour guides to continuously adapt their operations in accordance with ever-changing weather conditions, types of terrain, dynamics of the group and capabilities of individual participants.

Looking from a Safety-II perspective, these adjustments in operation cannot be viewed as deviations from standardized procedures but should be seen as very much necessary practices of resilience that enable safety of operations in changing environments. Observations from Haegeli and Pröbstl-Haider (2016), that have studied the mountain guiding, documented that experienced tour guides maintain acceptable levels of risk in changing environment by routinely modifying plans of operation are quite similar to this.

What is crucial to understand in this case is that our findings indicate that safety systems and adaptive capability are not by any means two opposing approaches when we are talking about safety management. Organizations that implement various safety audits, emergency procedures and different risk assessments tend to also demonstrate strong cultures that emphasize reporting and strong learning practices. This is of particular importance in the context of small enterprises such as adventure tourism businesses, where it remains essential that there is a high level of operational flexibility. Formal structures in this case provide the stability needed for tour guides to exercise their professional discretion as effectively as possible in high-risk situations and environments.

There are certainly also some limitations that we have identified and which are related to organizational learning and incident reporting practices. If we can see that serious injuries were consistently documented and reported, near misses and minor incidents were recorded and reported much less. These findings are also consistent with previous research in this area where Bentley et al. (2010) reported that smaller operational disruptions tend to remain undocumented within the sector.

In light of both HRO and Safety-II perspectives, near misses or minor incidents that remain unreported represent a significant challenge as this is exactly what frequently provides important opportunities for learning and early intervention (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007; Hollnagel et al., 2015). This significant relationship between safety audits and near-miss reporting suggests that structures that are more formalized may help organizations in transforming operational experiences into shared knowledge throughout the organization rather than keeping them aside as isolated individual experiences.

We must also note that many smaller operators seem to rely heavily on tacit adaptation as well as informal coordination rather than strongly built systematic organizational learning systems. While it is true that this is most commonly seen as flexibility, and it may strengthen short-term adaptive capability, we must be aware that at the same time it also increases vulnerability when expertise is lost because of the seasonal employment patterns or simple staff turnover. The findings therefore suggest that strengthening organizational learning processes may represent an important area for future safety development within Norwegian adventure tourism.

This study also offers an important contribution to understanding the role of tour guide within adventure tourism businesses, especially their knowledge and expertise, as tour guide and general staff training is presented as one of the most widely implemented safety practices. There is a significant relationship between tour guide training and emergency preparedness. This suggests that tour guide competence is strongly embedded in broader organizational safety structures and not solely reliant on an individual’s capability. Through this finding we can see the correlation to previous research done by Hild et al. (2023) as well as Barry and Collins (2021), that focuses on centrality of tacit knowledge, as well as pattern recognition and adaptation when it comes to outdoor tour guiding.

As seen in the research, Norwegian operators take a strong reliance on tour guides’ abilities in the interpretation of subtle environmental cues, as well as their anticipation of operational problems in order to re-organize activities in real time. This type of behaviour is closely aligned with Naturalistic Decision-Making theory and Klein’s Recognition-Primed Decision model, which both talk about how experts in certain fields make effective decisions when facing time pressure or uncertainty based on their knowledge, and patterns of recognition rather than simply through formal analytical comparisons (G. Klein, 2014; G. A. Klein, 2017).

The reliance on seasonal and part-time staff additionally raises important management questions regarding competence transfer and onboarding. Although the present survey did not directly test differences in safety practices between permanent and seasonal workers, the findings suggest that businesses relying on flexible staffing structures need systematic routines for training, mentoring, and assessing client-facing staff before operational deployment. This dominance of seasonal staffing within Norwegian adventure tourism businesses further highlights the importance of tacit knowledge transfer as organizational resilience depends not only on expertise of the individuals forming this organization, but also heavily on its ability to both preserve as well as share and transmit operational knowledge throughout the teams of tour guides.

It is thus not surprising that mentorship programs, scenario-based training, as well as reflective practices and experimental learning have started to represent critical organizational capabilities within adventure tourism businesses that mostly operate in environmental uncertainty. Research done by Georgescu et al. (2024) has shown that adaptive capabilities, organizational culture, and competence development represent a central mechanism that can help organizations strengthen resilience in dynamic conditions.

Our study therefore shows this by demonstrating how tacit expertise can function as organizational infrastructure within organizations such as adventure tourism companies. In such environments, operational reliability depends not only on formal systems, but also on the organization’s capacity to cultivate and sustain adaptive expertise across all frontline staff.

There are several implications that can be used both in the management of similar tourism organizations as well as policy making for the researched field. First, the results clearly suggest that by investments in the competencies of tour guides, mentorship and scenario-based training, may be the most important safety investments that are available to small adventure tourism businesses. This means that safety management systems should be designed in a way that they not only enforce compliance but rather strengthen adaptive capability, communication and operational coordination.

Secondly, the findings showcase that formal systems and adaptive expertise should not be seen and treated as competing approaches to safety management, but rather as complementary, where effective safety systems tend to support organizational learning while still allowing professionals their discretion and flexibility in dynamic environments.

Finally, the findings also carry implications for policy makers. In highly variable outdoor environments such as those seen in Norwegian adventure tourism, rigid standardization itself might not be enough. Regulatory approaches need to balance prescriptive safety requirements on one hand with recognition of the adaptability and expertise required for safe operations on the other hand. Supporting industry-wide learning systems, tour guide development, and knowledge-sharing mechanisms could lead to strengthening of resilience across a wide range of operators in adventure tourism sector.

6. Conclusions

This study has examined how Norwegian adventure tourism businesses manage safety with limited organizational redundancy while operating in natural environments that present highly variable operational scenarios. Our findings clearly show that safety management is done with a very dynamic interaction between formal safety structures on one hand and a combination of tour guide competences and adaptive operational practices on the other hand. Environmental uncertainty, especially rapid weather changes, terrain exposure and potential cold-water conditions remain the dominant operational challenge; this reinforces earlier research (Bentley & Page, 2008; Morgan & Dimmock, 2006) that clearly positions adventure tourism as sector defined by high-risks and low-tolerance for errors.

The results further show that organizations that have more formalized safety systems that include audits, emergency procedures, risk assessments, and so on, also exhibit stronger reporting cultures and more systematic organizational learning. This supports perspectives from High-Reliability Organization theory and Safety-II, that both emphasize the importance of structured processes as well as adaptive capacity in complex environments (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007; Hollnagel, 2017).

At the same time, we can also see the very central role of tacit knowledge and Naturalistic Decision Making. Norwegian adventure tourism operators place heavy reliance on tour guides’ judgements, as well as their pattern recognition and the ability of tour guides to make rapid decisions; this is directly consistent with the Recognition-Primed Decision model (G. A. Klein, 2017). These findings clearly show that the expertise of frontline employees and organizational systems are not competing approaches to safety, but rather mutually reinforcing components of operational reliability as well as safety.

As in all research there are certain limitations that need to be acknowledged. The study relies on self-reported survey data, which may be influenced by respondent interpretation or organizational self-presentation. The sample used is diverse, but it does represent only a portion of Norwegian adventure tourism operators, thus it may not capture the full range of practices across the sector. The cross-sectional design also limits the ability to observe how safety practices have evolved through time or how they have evolved as a response to a specific incident.

As for further research, we would propose the use of qualitative methods—such as interviews, field observations, or incident analyses—to deepen understanding of tacit knowledge, decision-making processes, and real-time adaptation. Additionally, comparative studies across countries, especially those with similar adventure tourism products, could clarify how environmental, regulatory, or cultural contexts shape safety management. Last, but not least, longitudinal research would also help identify how organizational learning develops and how formal and informal safety practices interact over time.

Although the empirical context is Norway, several findings may be relevant to adventure tourism businesses in other countries. For example, small companies characterized by dynamic natural environments, seasonal staffing, and small-firm structures are quite common in tourism, and the findings may therefore be relevant for comparable contexts such as other Scandinavian countries, Iceland, Scotland, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. However, comparative studies are needed before broader generalizations can be made. The present study treats adventure tourism businesses as one broad sector. However, activities such as rafting, climbing, sea kayaking, skiing, and glacier guiding involve different risk profiles and may require different safety management approaches. Future research should compare safety practices across activity categories and hazard types.