147 – The Hospitality Show 2024 Preview

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

Check out the latest Suite Spot episode where President - Hospitality, Travel, & Wellness at Questex, Alexi Khajavi, sits down on the podcast to discuss the highly anticipated Hospitality Show 2024 in San Antonio, Texas! This special episode will cover what attendees can expect this year from the event, some urgent issues facing the hospitality industry, and how this event is bringing all the major players of hospitality together in one room. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. Thank you so much for joining me today. We have another incredible episode continuing our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series, but we have an original TMG Hospitality Trailblazers, one of the first. Joining me again for the second time. Alexi Khajavi, President, Hospitality Travel and Wellness at Questex. Alexi, thank you so much for joining me once again on the Suite Spot. Alexi Khajavi : Great to see you, Ryan. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we've got a lot to cover. Lots change since we spoke just last year. We've got a very fast moving industry with travel, a lot of positive changes, and we're gonna get to some of those a little bit later. But with this being the second time, we kicked off last episode talking about your hospitality and travel journey and what led you to Questex, but I wanna talk about mentor, right? We're still kind of combating this staffing shortage right now, and we wanna talk about maybe some of the mentors or influences in your career, and then speak to maybe the importance of mentors right now as we try to combat this staffing shortage, especially in an industry like hospitality. Alexi Khajavi : Yeah. I would love to. It's an important topic. Ryan Embree: You wanna go ahead and share some of maybe the mentors in your hospitality career, or influences in your career? Alexi Khajavi : Yeah, you know, I've had a really diverse career in travel and hospitality. I mean, it started out in San Francisco in the sort of the ".com" era of 1997 to, you know, 2001, 2002. And I had the fortune of joining an early stage OTA. There was three OTAs that launched ironically in 1997. One was booking.com and one was Expedia. And I joined the third one.