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Tourists are more interested in immersive local experiences and are willing to spend more for them. Among them, 83 percent prefer to explore diverse customs and cultural characteristics; 82 percent prefer spending more on rewarding themselves; 77 percent prefer to deeply immerse themselves in the local region and make local acquaintances; and 77 percent refused conventional travel styles and pursue unique experiences. (https://newsroom.hilton.com/)

The rapid deployment and use of digital technology that was once a trend is now becoming widely accepted in all parts of society. With a society that has become increasingly technologically guided, consumers now have the opportunity to experience efficient services provided by the companies. This is especially true for the hospitality industry, whose trend has resulted in guests expecting targeted, more active and equally efficient products and services. The guest’s experience is the most important characteristic to reach the goals of a hotel. If the hotel doesn’t offer a great experience, then it has high chances of losing its guests to others. (Ristova & Dimitrov, 2019)

This is why, digitalization represents an opportunity for the hospitality industry, leading to great changes and growth. Hotels are aiming to provide their guests with innovative solutions and emerging technologies such as IoT, VR & big data and the results are quite clear; higher guest satisfaction, better experience, better previsions, better management. (Ristova & Dimitrov, 2019)

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The strategy of Hilton for 2025 is: achieving growth through enhanced innovation, brand, talent and guest experiences. I am going to paint a picture of the future. I will scope my vision to knowledge management and reflect it to Hilton worldwide strategy.

Worldwide megabrand has its strengths in size and it can help hoteliers to set-up a successful franchising business where feasible. Brand standards will guide the hotelier to manage business step-by-step. Just go by the book, work hard and rest will follow - at least in theory.

As stated in the intro customers are looking for authentic local experiences. This is where Hilton has to step up and find a way to develop a knowledge base system that ables area and culture-specific co-creation together with the corporation and properties in order to produce more distinctive services that are closely tied to culture and surroundings of the area. We can benchmark to Air BNB, a designer-driven business efficiently highlighting cultural characteristics both in accommodation and experiences.

All strong companies create and use knowledge. When these companies have to interact with their environments, they get information, transform into knowledge, and use to make a decision based on their experiences, values, and internal rules. If a company does not have the knowledge, it cannot manage itself to be a strong company. (Pusaksrikit, 2006)

Service and experience production benefits greatly from knowledge management. Careful planning is the key to all experience creation. We need to ensure that most of the knowledge, especially culture-specific, will be recorded and used in a controlled manner to customers benefit. The workforce in hospitality is often young and usually already tech-savvy, at least in Finland. I would like to see new methods bring life to knowledge management to make it more interactive and relevant. KM is a great tool for multiple purposes in a business environment as long as it is easy to reach and speaks to people.

When a company creates knowledge, it has to concern about interactive team working process. This process involves different backgrounds, cutting across organizational boundaries, and combing skills, artefacts, knowledge and experiences in new ways. There is an assumption that when people work together, they can produce more creative results than they work individually. It is hard to establish effective teamwork because people come from different backgrounds and have different knowledge bases. (Pusaksrikit, 2006)

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Three steps to keep knowledge management relevant in Hilton

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1. Scrap the current top-to-bottom knowledge management system
- co-create new KMS with staff for better commitment (by staff) and insight (staff/customers)
- make contributing to KB easy (enable voice messages, posts, bots, video messages, wiki-based approach)
- iterate and reduce

2. Enhance KMS user experience by data research and better interface design
- know your customers (staff)
- copy or incorporate familiar skins/platforms to the system for better usability
- provide properties with a selection of safe platforms that work best for them (telegram, WhatsApp, Vimeo, Miro, Padlet, skateboards etc.)

3. Build property or area-specific sub-knowledge base
- only to be used by the property (Hilton Strand) or the area (Nordics)
- audited centrally and locally
- produces valuable data for Hilton corp. for customer insight for service innovation