Shaken, Not Stirred: Knowledge Transfer in the Hospitality Industry

The tourism and hospitality industry depends heavily on the ways its workers use their knowledge in order to provide the best possible experiences to clients. Hence, it is of paramount importance for all tourism organizations, particularly hospitality ones, to have a knowledge management approach that allows them to retain their best workers and therefore keep their clients satisfied. The main objectives of the research presented in this chapter were to analyze how hospitality organizations have been managing their organizational knowledge—namely, how they stimulate knowledge transfer between individuals and groups within the hotels—as well as to identify the best practices and new solutions given the challenges presented by the knowledge society. This chapter presents some of the results concerning knowledge transfer of a larger empirical study on knowledge management in the hospitality industry based on three case studies in three different hotel groups operating in the Algarve, Portugal.