The 2025 Hospitality Show is fast approaching! While it is only a couple of months away, it will take place in Denver, Colorado, on October 26-28. Alexi Khajavi, President of Questex—Hospitality, Travel, & Wellness, joins the Suite spot to discuss the upcoming event and what attendees can look forward to this year.

Alexi shares insight on:

New Interactive Zones & Networking at THS 2025
Questex’s Quest Zero Sustainability Initiative
The Changing Landscape of Hospitality
Digital Marketing and the Importance of Social Media for Travel

And much more.

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. So happy to be with you today, previewing the 2025 Hospitality Show. Yes, it is that time of year, this year. We are headed out to Denver in October. We’re gonna talk all about it, with a very frequent guest, a Suite Spot veteran at this point, Alexi Khajavi, Questex President, Hospitality and Real Estate. Alexi, thank you so much for being on the Suite Spot once again with us.

Alexi Khajavi: Ryan, great to be here.

Ryan Embree: Yeah. We’re gonna talk about the Hospitality Show, but it is crazy to think that this, we had you back on the podcast in 2023 when this was first announced, and here we are today. You know, this is three years strong. This is the third year going into it. You know, I wanted to start with you. We’ve talked about your journey. We’ve talked about your role, some of the mentors along the way. I’d love to just hear from you, Alexi, if we could go back to that podcast in 2023. What do you think the biggest change in hospitality that you’ve seen over these last few years?

Alexi Khajavi: I’d say it’s half and half. I mean, on one hand, I think we were, we were absolutely correct and spot on in that hotel profitability and the complexity in hotel operations would only increase and would be in terms of achieving profitability would become harder, and more challenging. And I think we were right in that assessment and we continue to see a lot of challenges in the space. And now we’re starting to turn into negative territory in terms of operating performance with RevPAR ADRs and occupancy, which is normal, right? I mean, this is a cyclical, industry and it’s an industry that is dependent on the macro economy. So, we’ve had an incredible run, but I think looking back in 2023, we absolutely got that right. It was only gonna become increasingly more complicated and challenging, and that therefore profits would also be challenging in turn. What I don’t think we anticipated was how massively AI would start to impact not only our industry, but our world. And it is increasingly becoming, I think it’s, it’s gonna have a much more deeper impact on, in a shorter time than what we anticipated back in 2023. And not all of that, by the way, is negative. There’s a lot of positive opportunities that come out from AI, but I think we’re all trying to figure it out right now in the hospitality industry. Could be both a beneficiary, but will certainly and undoubtedly be impacted by it. But those are two things that I think we got right, and one, I think we, we didn’t anticipate the enormity of the impact of AI.

Ryan Embree: Yeah, or the acceleration. I mean, in a industry whose technology adoption is typically slower than most, we’re, we’re up there right now, I mean, or at least hoteliers. And the market feels like hospitality is trying to embrace this maybe differently than other technological fads, right. And I think it’s really, really cool to see, you ever want to explain the complexity of hospitality to someone who doesn’t know hospitality? Go to the Hospitality Show and see all the vendors that are on that showcase list, and you’re gonna see everything over there. And I think that’s why hoteliers, I know I certainly I do, but hoteliers love the hospitality show because it brings everyone to one specific place. And the challenging operations that you mentioned, Alexi, continue to kind of stack up the hats that GMs can continue to put on and wear. It’s all in one place and at one location. And with this location being in Denver. So you launched the Hospitality Show in Vegas, I don’t think probably a great place to launch any type of show. Moved to San Antonio last year, right by right beside the Riverwalk. Here we are in 2025 in Denver making its debut in Colorado. What are you most excited about for this location? What do you think it brings to the hospitality show?

Alexi Khajavi: Well, Colorado has a huge and vibrant ecosystem of hospitality companies, all ranging from, obviously, Veo and, the ski resort infrastructure that’s throughout Colorado, but you’ve got some incredible management companies that are based there, developers and technology. There’s a thriving ecosystem across the hospitality space. And all of those categories and brands that are within each of those are supporting THS and getting that local support as we did in Vegas and San Antonio is critical to the success. So I mean, bringing it to Denver, which is a great downtown, a lot of new hotels have opened up just in the last two, three years. So a really vibrant hotel stock that’s gonna be, where our guests and our delegates and our sponsors and exhibitors will all be staying. And we’re bringing the city into the experience. So, we’ve got, as always, we’ve got an incredible two nights of evening receptions where we bring the industry together from senior leaders to GMs and students and everything in between. But it’s just a great town. You know, there’s great restaurants, great sports teams. We’re there, you know, while both the NBA and the NFL are in action, and there’s a lot of that, hospitality ecosystem that we’re bringing into experiences, whether that be for the entire delegation or for guests just to take out clients, meet each other and network and so forth. We’ve got the University of Denver, which has a vibrant hospitality program also that we’re supporting and is supporting the Hospitality Show as well as Visit Denver and, and the Chamber of Hotels and the CBB. So, Denver is a great place to be. It’s a good time of year to be there in October. It’s typically not too hot and before the snow starts to fall. But look, at the end of the day, I mean, the local economy and the state economy really does appreciate the impact that tourism hospitality delivers to Colorado and the businesses and the labor and employment that depend on that. So, we’ve got a lot of support from the local market that is great. And that will be there in full force and it’s just a great town, right? I mean, it’s right downtown. Like San Antonio, you can walk to bars, restaurants in your hotel, you can go catch a game with the nuggets, and if you come in early on Sunday, I even think the Broncos are playing. So it should be a good time, in addition to all the education and the networking, and the inspiration that’ll be happening at the convention center.

Ryan Embree: Yeah, I’ve seen firsthand what you’re talking about, Alexi, about bringing that local flare. Some of the things you and your team did last year in San Antonio, a live mariachi band. So cool that that was day that Di de Los MUTOs was going on as well, as well as a World Series. You brought a little bit of that flare, so can’t wait to see what you got planned this year. We’re excited for it along with the obviously local community that has a big impact on this show. You have a great partnership with AHLA, and obviously we’ve had a lot of AHLA members kind of giving us some quarterly check-ins, making sure the hoteliers are up to date with the most important topics, trends, and issues out there that they advocate for. Can you talk about maybe that partnership with AHLA and how it’s kind of helped shape and grow this event?

Alexi Khajavi: Yeah, I mean, look, AHLA at the American Hotel and Lodging Association is the preeminent association and membership community for the hotel and hospitality sector. And we started this in partnership with AHLA. We were both aligned around our commitment to not only the industry and the brands within the industry, but in terms of the importance of connecting the ecosystem with the products and then the solutions that go hand in hand in addressing that operational complexity that we talked about. But more importantly, in driving hotel profits. And the better off we are from an operational perspective, the better experience the guest has, the more the guest will return and continue to support the hospitality industry. And the win-win is that the rest of the value chain benefits as well. So the more profits that the fragmentation of the industry, the brands don’t own, the bricks, and there’s typically a third party or often a third party operator in the middle of that is operating that operating business on behalf of the owners under a flag for the brand. I mean, you can tell just from the business model, we’re a bit more complex, we’re a bit more nuanced, than a traditional, piece of commercial real estate. So, which makes it very fascinating, right? And then you add in this guest into the middle of that, and all of those guest, you know, expectations are changing as well. So all of that happening, you know, AHLA has a deep understanding of the industry, of the guests, of the operators, but more importantly, they’ve got a commitment to improving that ecosystem and that value chain. And so our interests are a hundred percent aligned around that. It’s why we launched the hospitality show is because the hospitality show is really the only event in the industry that brings both senior leadership as well as the decision makers in procurement, operations, general managers, food and beverage directors, revenue managers, sales and marketing, all across HR and finance. Those individuals that are all making decisions from senior level CEOs of the brands and some of the largest investment funds and groups to everyone in between. And that’s a really unique thing for hospitality in that many other industries, whether it be construction or technology or plastics or military, all have at least one event, which is what we call a tent pole event, where the best, the brightest, the most qualified and the most active in that industry all gather once a year. And, you know, hospitality didn’t have that. And the preeminent foremost association for the US lodging industry didn’t have that. And so that really was, for us, a white space in the industry and in the landscape of all the events that are out there. So, you know, AHLA is a perfect partner. They’re the right partner, they are heavily invested in this, and, you know, we make every decision all throughout the process and the planning and the post-event, AHLA and Questex, are side by side in it. So it really does put the stamp of approval, and it’s why, frankly, we get, the largest collection of CEOs and brands and operators and advisors all there with those owner operators. So it’s a great opportunity and it’s a great partnership, and we’re delighted to have them on board, and it’s a two decades long, partnership. So it’s only just beginning.

Ryan Embree: Yeah. I mean, it’s such a truly remarkable, unique event and what better place or maybe authority to go to for key industry issues than the advocacy group that is AHLA pushing some of these, these important issues that are, are so critical to our business. But you’re absolutely right. I mean, the programming that you and your team put together for this event is so intentional that it can speak to your C-level executives all the way down to your frontline, even sometimes students, what you were, you were mentioning there, and you’ve really, you’ve kind of gone through the process, Alexi with me on past episodes about talking about how you’ve incorporated and listened and listened to guest feedback. And I think for events that are going to sustain, grow and be successful, you obviously have to get that feedback from attendees on what’s missing? What do you like, where did we miss the mark to improve? And you’ve kind of gave us the behind the scenes of that process for you and your team. We saw some new additions to this year’s show the recharge zone, interactive zone, F&B zone. Can you talk about maybe these new components of the show and how it’s addressed, maybe some of the guest feedback you were hearing?

Alexi Khajavi: One of the biggest feedback, points and topics that we heard was personalization continues to be both an opportunity and a challenge for hoteliers. And it’s, much more demand by the guest, right? The guest is choosing hospitality in large part because they want to be treated, with a human, personalized, authentic, you know, service. But behind that, it’s technology that really drives that. And so the the reality is that of the 50 some odd thousand hotels that are in the US, the overwhelming majority of each of those hotels, tech stacks is already outdated. So a huge amount of transformation needs to take uptake place across the hospitality, sector in terms of the backend tech. And that backend tech is what’s gonna fuel that human experience, that personalized delivery of service and experience and memorable experiences, basically that fueled the industry. So that was a, that’s been a really strong driving point as to how do you use technology effectively to empower humans not to replace the human component of hospitality. And then looking at, to your point, the departments within a hotel, F&B, revenue management, wellness, as well as, looking at the startups that are coming into the space, because the tech industry in and of itself looks at hospitality to the point you made earlier, Ryan, as being a late bloomer, a late adopter of technology, whereas many other markets, healthcare and so forth, have already invested heavily and have already incorporated a lot of technology into their infrastructure. So we’ve got a long way to go, which is, you could look at as being a negative, but is it’s actually a positive. We’re also launching and or what, not launching, but continuing with the general manager summit and luncheon, that starts on Sunday. We’ve got the GM awards, so we’re actually bringing over 500 GMs there. Um, Which is really one of the most, I’d say rewarding parts of THS because GMs are the unsung hero, of unrecognized, but we’re, we’re changing that. Again, that’s an Asian initiative, which we’re bringing into to the Hospitality Show. But we’re also looking at the cities and how the hospitality industry can work more effectively with their local mayors, their local councils and their state, local legislations. We’ve got Walter Eisenberg, CEO of Sage Hospitality Group, which is a local Denver, Colorado based, business, which will be starting us off on Sunday. We also have, Mehul Patel, who’s the managing director of Newcrest, one of the most well-known, he’ll be speaking with Heather Tre, who’s the vice president of Ofra International, one of the largest procurement companies that we have. And then on Sunday as well, we’ve got Chris Barton, which for those of you that don’t know, probably use the technology like I do every day, was the founder of Shazam. And he may be wondering, you know, why, why we’re bringing in the founder of Shazam and it and it’s because Chris identified this human need, which is when we all hear that song on the radio, you’re driving in the car, you don’t know, you know what it is, but you desperately need to know, you know, what that song is because you love it or you hate it, whatever it may be. And you use technology to fulfill a very human need, and it becomes a very authentic and a very sentimental moment when you can capture what that song is or what that tune is. So, again, we’re trying to change the aperture of just looking at hospitality through the various departments or the various, you know, sort of technologies that go into a hotel tech stack. We have all that. We’ve got over 500 exhibitors, but we’re trying to give people the opportunity to really think about how other industries are using technology and are looking creatively to solve human needs and human wants, and then to create these memorable experiences. So it’s a mix of both information and inspiration. And honestly, Ryan, one of the things that’s been fueling us this year based off of your question and what the feedback has been is that, in an age of information, ignorance is a choice, and there’s no shortage of information and knowledge out there. So not being knowledgeable about what those products and solutions are to driving hotel profitability is frankly a choice. And so the folks that are making the choice to attend the hospitality show and lean in are making that choice to improve their operations, improve their businesses, and improve their own profitability, which is all, which is a win-win for the entire industry.

Ryan Embree: There you go. You can punch your ticket right there. That is a great selling point to get people inspired to go to this Hospitality Show. But you’re right, I mean, I still remember the inspiring words of Admiral McRaven in 2023 in Vegas, Aaron Andrews and Jose Andres last year, incredible keynote speakers. And obviously Jose had some very impactful stories about hospitality. But I think all of the lessons learned, you’ve mentioned it on this podcast with me, Alexi, they make for great icebreakers and conversations and networking and things that you can apply to different pieces of your business, which is so eclectic and complex as we’ve talked about. And one of those topics that can continues to be prioritized that we hear personalization is certainly one of the sustainability always a hot topic. Questex has its own initiative, Quest Zero. Can you share a little bit about that program and how you see sustainability evolving into the hospitality show programming this year?

Alexi Khajavi: Yeah. Our sustainability in that Quest Zero is you, uh, as you mentioned, that is our, not only our, our initiative, but it’s our promise to ourselves and our customers, both, you know, exhibitors and sponsors as well as the delegates that we will repurpose, recycle and reduce all of the products, the services that we ourselves use to put into, and to put on an event of the scale that the hospitality show, uh, does. And look, that’s, you know, that’s often harder than it should be because there, it doesn’t exist the products or the solutions to solve something to reduce or to recycle. But in terms of signage, in terms of carpet, in terms of lighting and food waste, those are all areas which we address directly at the hospitality show. And we reduce as well as reuse. So the food, for example, in conjunction with the convention center, we’re very focused, very much focused on reducing that food waste. And where we do have overages of food, and we always do, we want to have our delegates well fed and imbibed, in hospitality. We then contributed and donate it to local charities and centers to support the needy. So, all of those things, frankly, are replicating what hotels, many hotels are doing and programs that already exist in hospitality. And so at the very minimum, we are a reflection of what the hospitality industry is doing in terms of our its corp corporate social responsibility. And look, it’s a journey. I would be the first one to say that, you know, we’re not perfect, but we’re on that pathway to improving all of those areas. And we continue to work with, you know, industry associations as well as AHLA to find ways to reduce and recycle and frankly just minimize the impact and the footprint that putting on our event of this scale does. But yeah, it’s very important to us and our partners and our customers, also support it as well. And they do their own initiatives, alongside THS as well. So, yeah, it’s a very integral part of not only Questex, but of the Hospitality Show as well.

Ryan Embree: Well, and it helps the travelers guests, they’re asking for this stuff, right? This is more than just a traveler trend right now of people asking for sustainable practices, corporate corporations looking at a eco budget, rather than how can we make our travel a little bit more eco-friendly? So it’s really, really cool to see that momentum. And I think this is a show like the Hospitality Show, when you have different brands come together, different ideas come together, this is when we can help move that industry forward, especially on important issues like that. Again, our guests are asking for their craving, and they’re certainly prioritizing in their travel when they’re searching for travel. So you mentioned it before, Alexi, GM of the Year Awards, one of my personal favorite parts of the hospitality show, incredible stories, incredible people. How do we, one of the things we probably would still tell each other in 2023 is we’re still battling the staffing shortage to a degree, right? I think we’re always gonna have that, but how do we get some more inspiring stories like these incredible ones that we hear out from the hospitality show into the ears and minds of this younger generation to think of hospitality as a career and not just a summer job that you fall into in college and then fall in love with after that.

Alexi Khajavi: I mean, it’s a big issue and there isn’t a silver bullet solution to it. But to your point, I mean, it starts one by celebrating, those general managers that most of them, frankly, have come through the ranks of the operational side of the business, right? I mean, they, you don’t just start as a general manager. You start, doing the night audit. You start as a bell cap, you know, you start in housekeeping, you start in the kitchen and really in an industry, and frankly in an economy that does struggle to create career paths and opportunities to start here and end up there with higher earning power, higher authority, greater responsibility. I mean, that’s the American dream right then and there, right? So, not to be, you know, romantic or hyperbolic, but the hospitality industry is hook, line and sink, or directly linked to what we all sort of anecdotally refer to as that American dream. Is that you can work your way up and you can move into management and increase your income and your lifestyle.

Ryan Embree: And that’s what we all want, right? So celebrating those GMs is paramount to one, why the hospitality show exists. But second to your point, it’s just very, very special. You know, to see those stories, to hear those stories and to engage with those general managers from across the country is a very special moment. We do many touch points and different variations of it, we’ve got the awards, we’ve got the summit, we’ve got the luncheon, and then of course, they’re walking through the expo floor, they’re at the networking reception, so they’re a core part of the audience. And the CEOs, I like to tell the story, the past two years, and I would expect it again this year, Jeff Bti, CEO of Wyndham and others for that matter. I don’t want to just say it was Jeff, but you know, he’s right at the front row. He’s clapping on GMs from other brands because he knows, and he absolutely is connected in his own career. You know, similar story, knows that it’s those individuals which really do deliver the experience, but more importantly, it’s ensuring that those individuals get recognized and that they become lessons for others, whether they’re in the industry today or are looking for a career, that you have an opportunity in hospitality to grow your career and grow your own lifestyle and your opportunities. Which again, which then goes to the other point, which is then connecting it to young people and young folks looking to enter a career at college or at a vocational school or coming out of high school. Again, we have a perception as an industry, a misconception, if you will, that we are a summer job, we’re low paying and we’re low skilled. And nothing could be further from the truth because it doesn’t tell the whole truth, right? And so I think we are like our partnership with the University of Denver, we are connecting this with the school, trying to help the school to promote the incredible program that they have at the university. And David Corson, the dean there is on our advisory board, the planning committee for THS. So we’re gonna be bringing students there from that program, but others as well. And really our job here is to encourage greater promotion and understanding that the industry is a great industry to be in, and it provides a lot of opportunities, but again, you’ve gotta show it from real life people, right? You’ve gotta show that GM started here and ended up there and has a great opportunity and a great career to go even higher. And I just don’t know many other industries that you can do that. I mean, nothing wrong with them, but typically, you need a four year degree and you then have to start at the top, and you may end up somewhere near the top or hopefully at the top, but this is really one that you can start in any department and really then move your way around and find your place. And it doesn’t mean that you always have to end up as a GM or the CEO, but there’s plenty of opportunities. And as we’ve seen, this is a human deliberate. This is a human powered industry. So even with AI coming on board, it’s just gonna open up more opportunities for people to choose a career that they love and have a great opportunity to support themselves and their families, which is, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Ryan Embree: I think that’s a great pitch to a young professional earlier in their hospitality career. But, and maybe I’ll go on the other side and, and maybe speak to the veteran hospitality leaders out there that might be listening to this. Also be open to mentorship of these young professionals to show them, share your story, how this can turn into a career. And to speak to the technology side, Alexi, that you were talking about, this younger generation coming in, they’re gonna see some of these processes that we might still have in hospitality and say, what are we doing here? Right? They might like look at it as old technology, and it could be an opportunity to freshen up what you’re doing. Definitely keep a listening ear because they’re gonna have expectations of what they want in their career. So hopefully we see more of that.

Alexi Khajavi: Ryan, I think I don’t think you could be more correct in that statement. I mean we tend to think of it as, as, you know, the business needs to upgrade and needs to modernize, but the reality is, is that it’s still our employees and our colleagues are gonna be using these platforms and these technologies. And if your CSR your booking engine, your global distribution system, your guest management system, your revenue management system, whatever, all of these platforms that are all within that hotel tech stack, if they still look like something from 1984 platform a user experience, it’s failed already, right? It doesn’t matter how good the system is that you can’t get the users to use them. And as we wanna attract these younger talent, our platforms and the user experience part of that platform in order to improve, reduce the data silos, and in order to improve the API connections between all these systems talking to each other, and ultimately to really truly provide a personalized experience in hospitality, which can drive revenue, drive loyalty, IE drive money and and profits. The platforms have to be modern, they have to be user friendly, and they’re not in many cases. And so, the startup zone, that we’ve launched is really in many cases, in many ways, a curation of those new technologies, which are not only improving the solving a problem in the industry, but many of ’em, to your point, are actually trying to create a better user experience within the platform themselves so that the users, the employees and the colleagues that we have in the industry enjoy using it, which becomes, again, it’s a bit of a win-win there.

Ryan Embree: Yeah. If any time, Alexi, it’s ripe for disruption right now with everything that’s going on. So, to be at that startup zone that you were talking about to learn, be open to these new technologies that maybe a decade ago, your organization wasn’t ready to make that shift, this is the time to do it. Because if you’re not here, you could be already five years behind. Speaking of kind of where we’re at right now, I want to give you a crazy hypothetical, but if you started the Hospitality Show, let’s say in the nineties, probably be very different to where starting it in 2023 and the role that digital marketing plays. We started the Suite Spot. It’s a digital marketing podcast. Can you talk to, I remember when I first saw the, the Hospitality Show, social media page come up, and now here you are, you got thousands of followers on social media. Talk to us about how digital marketing has played a role in really growing this show right now.

Alexi Khajavi: I mean, marketing and demand generation capabilities in hospitality are woefully missing. Some of it is self-inflicted, but for others, for hotels with limited staff, a strategic marketing plan is frankly impossible or extremely challenging. There’s only so much you can do with a limited amount of staff. Talking about COVID, again, to your point earlier on, sales and marketing staffs were the first ones that were let go during the pandemic, and many of them have still not been staffed back up. So we lost this tranche of sales and marketing commercial know-how across the industry, and we’re still suffering from that today. So, you know, technology at its very core, hospitality technology exists to help hotels drive profitable demand through an omnichannel marketing plan. So, essentially how do you build a plan to target the right audiences on the right channel at the right time with the right price? Because the reality of dynamic pricing, which is in hospitality, is you and I can be staying on the same floor, on the same dates, in the same room type, and yet have paid completely different rate through different channels at different times. And that can’t be underestimated the complexity of that to get it right. And it’s not just just changing it willy-nilly, right? But it’s about optimizing the right channel to the right audience at the right time with the right price. And the right price is different for you at a different time on different channels. So it’s highly, highly, highly complex. And if you don’t get it right, you’re gonna be leaving money on the table. And if you do get it right, you’ll be outperforming your market set exponentially. So the campaigns have to be thoughtfully tracked and they have to be thoughtfully optimized, and they have to achieve a measurable return on investment, which is the other bit, right? Because how do you actually attribute what you did and what you spent or the resources you allocated to the return on that investment, again, achievable, doable with all within the technology that’s out there in the marketplace today, that didn’t exist frankly, five years ago and didn’t exist certainly 10 years ago, but exists today. But again, it’s about connecting that product or that solution to the right person, making sure that the labor and that the talent exists to use that properly. Because look, I mean take Meta Search or SEO programs, you know, those are marketing strategies that drive real results for a hotel to get seen on the most popular internet search engines influencing travelers. We’ve been talking about this for, you know, 15, 20 years, but talk about social media. My kids don’t go to the website, they don’t go to Google to influence our vacation plans. And they very much influence our vacation plans. They go to TikTok and they go to Instagram. And I can’t tell you how many hotels that are in destinations that we were going to, because we already knew we were going to Cabo San Lucas. But if they didn’t have a social media plan and execution and optimization and attribution plan, well, they’re not gonna get found. I don’t care whether you got five stars, whether you’re TripAdvisors, good, bad, sideways, those are things that I search for, but they’re not things that our kids and the younger generation search for, which frankly have either influenced my spend, our generation spend, or they themselves are getting old enough to make their own purchasing decisions. So sales and marketing’s a really critical area for the Hospitality Show, and we’ve built that up over the last three years. We have a partnership with HSMAI, so we bring their sales and marketing experts, and we’re bringing more of them this year, and we’re connecting them to more products and solutions that drive that demand generation and marketing capabilities. Because frankly, and I get no joy out of saying this, we still market hotels like it was 1994, to your point.

Ryan Embree: The complexity spills over from the operational. I mean, you talked about how challenging it can be right now on an operational standpoint. Part of that operations is your sales and marketing and the digital landscape is changing at a very fast pace. And if you are fully not optimized on social media like you’re talking about, and those places are hard, we still think in old attribution models when it comes to social media and reviews sometimes of saying, how much is this? How many bookings is this post gonna get me? How many bookings am I gonna get from this five star review? And you can’t think like that. You have to think about your digital presence, they always call it the online billboard to try to make that translation to something physical. But if you don’t have that upkept exactly like you were saying, Alexi, with your, with your parallel there, you’re not gonna be found in, you’re certainly not gonna be chosen by the travelers once they get there.

Alexi Khajavi: And the data is siloed still in the industry, right? Because of the fragmentation of the industry itself, because of the fragmentation of many of the technology platforms within this tech stack not communicating with each other. All of that data is siloed. And what that does is, again, we call ourselves a hospitality industry, but how many times have you showed up to a hotel, that you stay at often, I mean, this is me and I, and I will not name the hotel, but I stay there so much that I know who they are. And oftentimes they forget me because they’re seeing thousands of more people than, I’ve got an advantage in that human to human, occasionally a couple of them because we’ve made a connection, will remember me. Hello Mr. Khajavi, nice to see you again. But those that don’t, the fact that I’ve stayed there hundreds of times now will say, is this your first time staying with us? And, you know, there’s nothing that, that could have filled a moment after a plane ride and a taxi, and you’re tired to say, lovely to see you again, Mr. Khajavi. Breakfast is still serving, I know you like croissants, donut and a coffee. That creates a human connection. And that is what hospitality is. And I’m not asking, in this case, it’s the human that is actually performing better than the data, the technology, because a couple of the front desk staff remember me and I can tell you just that, hello, and that welcome back drives loyalty. It happens so intermittently and that there isn’t a data and there’s a solution for it. But the fact that in 2025, we still haven’t connected to that. And I’m a part of the loyalty plan. I stay there all the time. I know them, I know the ownership group, I know the third party management. So again, I’m not your normal John Doe coming off the street. I didn’t book through, you know, an OTA, I did everything right, quote unquote right, for the hotel to know me and not have to remember me, right? To have a popup come and say, Mr. Khajavi stayed with you last May, and he stayed with you for four nights and he got dry cleaning five times. The power of that. And those are the things that we can do. And those are the products and the solutions and the experts that are doing it, right, that owners, operators and GMs and food and beverage directors and heads of housekeeping are gonna meet and are gonna connect with in Denver at the Hospitality Show. Because until we get people together, together that are a part of that, and that know what’s working, what’s not working, how to make it work, we’ll never solve it, right? And we’ve got to solve this because if we don’t solve it, well now we’re just a commodity and we’re really losing out on the art of hospitality. And if we achieve the art of hospitality, I can promise you the profits and the loyalty and the demand will be much, much higher than what it currently is today. And there’s, that’s not a bad thing.

Ryan Embree: Absolutely. And loyalty will go through the roof, like you talked about, customer retention, it’s a snowball effect. And it’s events like the hospitality show that are gonna get us closer to being there. So if you’re listening to this, it’s the place to be. Let me make, make sure I get the dates right on this October 26th-28th in Denver. We will be there covering it. Again, bring you all the insights, exclusive interviews that we can. Alexi, wanna thank you for your time. Any final thoughts before we wrap up today?

Alexi Khajavi: Ryan, it was great to see you again. I looking forward to seeing you in Denver and looking forward to seeing everybody else as well.

Ryan Embree: Well, thank you so much for your time. We look forward to seeing you in Denver. Have a great rest of your summer and into your fall, and we’ll talk to you next time on the Suite Spot To join our loyalty program. Be sure to subscribe and give us a five star rating on iTunes. Suite Spot is produced by Travel Media Group. Our editor is Brandon Bell with Cover Art by Bary Gordon. I’m your host Ryan Embree, and we hope you enjoyed your stay.

Podurama

Home

Trending

Personal

Your Podcasts

New Episodes

My Files

Favourite Episodes

Tags (Folders)

Recently Played

Bookmarks

Followed Playlists

181 – The Hospitality Show 2025 Preview with Alexi Khajavi

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

AI Chapters

AI Insights

Reviews