Information management is crucial to control and correct the deviations of the organization and support the decision-making process in tourism and hospitality. It is also important to provide relevant data to reduce uncertainty in the decision process while helping to define scenarios, investigate hypotheses, and make predictions to build a vision of the company's future. The use of information systems to manage tourist information, nowadays, no longer guarantees competitiveness in the sector or the survival of the company. There is a need to look at organizations to capitalize on and develop their intellectual capital. This chapter investigates how to use tourist information to achieve the strategy desired by hoteliers to increase the capital associated with the customer and the economic performance of organizations. Therefore, this chapter presents the literature review on knowledge management and capital indicators applied to hospitality. As result, this study identified a set of capital indicators associated with the brand, customers, loyalty, distribution channels, and collaborators.
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Knowledge management contributes to innovating and increasing the organization's intellectual capital, as well as being used as a support system for the decision-making process to improve its performance and develop skills for the organization to increase its capacity. Also, to solve problems associated with its tangible and intangible assets, where the latter are fundamental to obtaining a competitive advantage (Santos & Ramos, 2009). Intellectual capital is considered an instrument for defining metrics associated with the organization's strategy. It helps assess economic performance to increase the company's value (Petty & Guthrie, 2000).
The organization has tangible capital, for example, the value of a product or service, and intangible or intellectual capital, which results from informal activities, and which has value for the organization, composed of human, structural, and relational capital, can still be considered a fourth dimension an of intellectual property capital, associated, for example, with patents or the number of prototypes (Vasconcelos & Barão, 2017). Therefore, Intellectual capital is associated with the set of competencies that characterize the organization, subdivided into relational, human, and structural capital. It can also be considered the fourth dimension that includes intellectual property (Santos & Ramos, 2009). Structural capital consists of the formal aspects of work organization and physical, social, political, and cultural spaces. Human capital encompasses all the skills and motivation of the organization's members and everyone's ability to learn. Relational capital comprises and considers the quantity and quality of relationships between members of the organization and between them and external entities relevant to the business, which includes customers, suppliers, partners, and distributors, among pertinent others in the tourist distribution chain.