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. 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. <laugh. But you know, it was filled with talented people from MIT and Stanford that were, and there was, I think there was about 40 of us in the beginning, and it was just explosive growth. And I at 25, 24 years old, just coming outta college was really given a seat at the table for which I was not, deserve it and was not prepared for, but it just gave me an incredible opportunity to sit amongst some of the most really intelligent, innovative and creative thinkers, that were applying that knowledge, which, you know, in our industry often, we don't get that type of talent, particularly back then. And because it was this merging of technology with travel, one of the world's largest in industries, it was just a really exciting time. And so there was a group of folks there that I had the pleasure of working with, and it really taught me, uh, some of the fundamentals that I, that I still carry with me today in my career. And one is just surrounding yourself with really great creative people, and there's something special about all being tuned into and aligned around the same strategic goals and allowing for a sort of an idea meritocracy to take place. But as long as all of that energy and all of that thinking and all of that hard work is geared around the same northern star, bringing that diverse set of thinking and individuals or personalities to the table really does create magic. And it creates, I think a sense of belonging as well. So from a very young age, that was, that was really important. Since then I've had the pleasure of working with individuals like Paul,