Well it's interesting to note that it was activated at 10:40pm, meaning that if they were to walk back to the road it would have been dark. Sensible thing to do would be to sleep in the car until daybreak. By activating the beacon at night they forced the rescue services to work in the dark.

Yes I agree, staying with the vehicle is a good idea, unless you are close (which they were) to a road and could flag someone down. It's also worth pointing out that if they were in a remote area there wouldn't have been any mobile phone coverage.

Another question might be - what were they doing off-road? Being nationals of a country that has the highest sales of "off-road" vehicles in Europe doesn't mean that they knew anything about actually taking those vehicles off-road!

Bill them I say!

I'm reminded of another funny story that happened quite a few years back, also in Australia. Some airline employees (from the former Ansett I think) decided to aquire one of the emergency rafts. One day they set off for a rafting trip and were happily rafting down a river when they were surprised to find helicopters converging on their location. They failed to anticipate that the beacon built into the raft would activate as soon as the raft inflated