Abstract
Knowledge management is a significant factor in tourism crisis management. To plan, make decisions, and react quickly and appropriately to tourism crises cannot be achieved without integration with the process of knowledge management and transfer. In addition, to manage crises, stakeholders depend on each other. Therefore, the collaboration of knowledge management between policymakers and industry agents, i.e. hotels in this study, requires further research. This study combines the fields of tourism crisis management and knowledge management. Few studies have explored their combined links to practice, especially in the context of Thailand. There is limited research to be found about the linkage between these two topics in the Thailand hospitality industry. Although the research topics are starting to gain academic attention, research on these two topics has been dominated by the positivist methodology. In addition, their data collection and analyses were mostly conducted by deductive value-free researchers. As a result, there were the limitations to the richness and depth of their findings. This research study’s main aim is to explore knowledge transfer and management for managing tourism crises in Thailand and to understand how this is manifested in the hotel sector. The specific research objectives of this study are: to analyse differences between the understanding and objectives of policymakers versus those of hotels for managing tourism crises; to analyse differences between hotels of different sizes and structures of ownership in recognizing tourism crises and their approaches to knowledge transfer/management; and to examine the barriers and facilitators they encounter. Multi-case strategies with a mixed qualitative approach, influenced by interpretivism, were used to investigate policymakers’ views and the knowledge management practices of embedded case studies in four different types of hotels: Type 1: Small/Independent; Type 2: Large/Independent; Type 3: Large/Thai chain; Type 4: Large/Foreign chain. Both interviews and non-interview evidence were used as data collection tools to ensure the dependability as well as the creditability of the findings. However, interviews were the main source of information in the data collection plan that was divided into two stages. First, semistructured interviews with tourism crisis management, consisting of 9 policymakers in 8 organisations based in Thailand. Second, semi-structured interviews with 29 hoteliers in different positions, ranking from top, middle to and rank-and-file, within 9 hotels located in Bangkok, Thailand. The finding of the research has shown that there is still a lack of shared understanding of crisis management and an unsatisfactory coordination between policymakers and hoteliers. This divergent understanding of such concepts can be one of the main issues that affect the collaboration between these stakeholders. It was found that the size and structure of ownership of different hotels plays an important part in knowledge management and transfer. There are differences in their commitment to crisis management and knowledge transfer practices, which are more developed in large chain hotels than in independent large and small hotels. Constrained resources to implement knowledge management are the factor that probably influences their commitment to knowledge management. Nonetheless, a lower number of employees within small hotels provided more chance of social interaction— especially face-to-face communication—to share knowledge. Technology nowadays helps increase the flow of knowledge in large organisations where there is more complexity in the organisational charts and a larger number of people and more information than in the small hotels. Culture, language and absorption capability are challenges, especially for an interorganisation knowledge transfer process. It was also found that human resources are far more of a barrier to reach effectiveness in knowledge management of tourism crises than organisational or technology factors.