When knowledge is properly managed, it's in the hands of those who need it BEFORE they need it. This greatly improves the speed of business operations by eliminating time-consuming information searching! This book will show you how to make any hospitality or tourism related business more efficient and competitive by using knowledge management concepts and techniques. It provides an essential introduction to the concept of knowledge management plus fascinating case studies, strategic advice, and structural recommendations for its implementation. You'll learn to use knowledge management to avoid the duplication of research, reducing the cost of product research and development and increasing the effectiveness of your overall operation. Helpful charts and figures make the information easy to access and understand. From the editors: “Although tourism and hospitality, with their geographically dispersed units, can profit from enhanced knowledge management, only a small number of firms have implemented knowledge management techniques. A recent study shows that although managers in many hotels consider knowledge management and information transfer to be 'relevant concepts,' they report being confronted with too many—and unclear—knowledge management strategies, activities, and implementation techniques. As a result, they are not sufficiently familiar with knowledge management and reject implementing it. This book will increase understanding of these concepts and help to speed the implementation of knowledge management in the hospitality and tourism industries.” This book will show you how to make any hospitality or tourism related business more competitive by using knowledge management concepts and techniques. It provides an essential introduction to the concept of knowledge management, with fascinating case studies as well strategic advice and structural recommendations for its implementation. In addition, you'll find: analyses of various aspects of knowledge management in hotels an examination of an Internet-based knowledge management system and its sources, repositories, taxonomy, services, applications, and user interfaces the advent of the “knowledge café” and what it means to the travel and tourism industries the knowledge supply chain matrix, which combines strategic and operative aspects of knowledge management—with a practical example drawn from the airline industry new developments in software applications for cross-border destination management, with an example drawn from the new “AlpNet” project that demonstrates the importance of cooperation and of member-specific requirements insightful thoughts about mental models as they relate to tourism—what they are and how understanding them can lead to lower degrees of mistrust and more efficient operation of tourism-based businesses essential information about database marketing, data mining, and knowledge discovery, with introductions to decision tree classifiers, regression analysis, induction programming logic, and probabilistic rules