Tune in to the inaugural installment of the Suite Spot: Road Trip series!  In this episode the Suite Spot takes a drive to SpringHill Suites Jacksonville Beach Oceanfront to meet with Area General Manager, Alex Reitter, and Area Director of Marketing & Sales, Samantha Pritchard.  Alex and Samantha give viewers an inside look at the property’s signature restaurant, The Sand Bar, and why this hotel needs to be the next destination on all traveler lists.   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, Ryan Embree. If you're listening to us or watching us on our YouTube channel, you'll see that we are not in our content creation studio in Maitland. We have hit the road for a new series, the Suite Spot Road Trip, and we are here at the Spring Hill Suites, Jacksonville Beach, Ocean Front. And I'm here with two wonderful guests joining me today, general Area General Manager Alex Reitter, and Area Director of Sales and Marketing, Samantha Pritchard. Alex. Samantha. Thank you so much for hosting us on the Suite Spot at your beautiful ocean front property. Alex Reitter: We're happy to have you. Thanks for coming out. Ryan Embree: Very excited to be here. As it is, Suite Spot tradition. One of the coolest thing about hospitality, we were talking about off camera is just our, the history, the DNA that gets built over the years. Maybe different brands, different management companies that you've been a part of. Everyone has a unique story, but it all leads us back to people serving people, right. That that's why we love hospitality. So love to hear maybe your backgrounds in hospitality and what let you here to a brand new property, which we're gonna talk about here shortly. Alex, we'll go ahead and start with you. Alex Reitter: Okay. Well, thanks Ryan. Thanks for coming out. Of course. Again. So, yeah, I think I have an interesting start in Hospitality fell into actually start out on small cruise ships. Intercoastal, I'm not even sure if you knew that Samantha. Samantha Pritchard: No. New Skills. Alex Reitter: So it was definitely a interesting start. You know, uh, intercoastal cruising, seven night trips up and down the, uh, east coast after college. You know, we did trips in Maine, Chesapeake Bay, all the way down to Florida. It was, you know, amazing experience. But when you're working six to eight weeks on a boat, nonstop, you kind of look for other options. And hotel kind of was a natural fit for me. From there, I've had a chance to actually work a courtyard down the street from this Spring Hill. And then actually a little time in the Florida Keys, uh, most recently in a Marriott in Durham, North Carolina. The weather got a little cold. It snowed a couple times on us, and we said, let's get back to Florida. So excited to be here. And excited to work with Samantha. I've only been here a couple months and ready to get the ball rolling. Ryan Embree: Well, I think you're our first guest that has got their hospitality start. I've, I've heard behind the front desk I've heard bellman. I don't know if I've ever heard on a cruise, so that's very, very cool. But it's a story that resonates probably with a lot of our hotel audience, and listeners sometimes just kind of jumping from place to place. But again, people serving people, hospitality. Samantha, you've had kind of a different journey here. Talk to us a little bit about that. Samantha Pritchard: Yeah, so I started my hospitality journey in the Convention Visitor Bureau with Visit Jacksonville. It was, it was some of the best years just learning the business, being around people that have been doing it a long time. So then I left the CVB and went out as a director of sales. So my first job on property was a director of sales, just from some of the hotel connections made dur...