Expertise
Who knows the destination best?
Why it matters
Who knows the destination best?
The most valuable knowledge in travel is rarely documented. It sits with the person on the front desk who knows which route floods, the guide who knows when the light is right, the events team who knows which venue actually handles a wheelchair well.
None of that is on a website, so none of it reaches an assistant. Organisations lose it at shift change and again at every resignation. Expertise is the pillar that asks where real judgement lives before deciding how to structure it.
What to identify
Where to look first
- The people whose judgement your organisation actually relies on.
- What they know that no page, PDF or database currently records.
- The questions travellers ask that only a person can answer well today.
- Where that knowledge is lost: handovers, seasons, turnover.
Assessment
Four questions worth answering honestly
- If your longest-serving staff member left tomorrow, what would you lose?
- Which traveller questions still get escalated to a human every time?
- Is any of that expertise written down anywhere at all?
- Who decides what counts as a good recommendation, and on what basis?
Maturity
Where organisations usually sit
- Undocumented. Knowledge exists only in people, and leaves with them.
- Anecdotal. Some of it is captured, inconsistently and without review.
- Collected. Expertise is gathered deliberately but not yet usable at scale.
- Curated. Judgement is recorded, attributed and maintained by named people.
- Compounding. Expertise is captured as a matter of course and improves with use.
Find out where you stand
Most engagements begin with a baseline across all six pillars, and a view of which one is holding the others back.