AntSol Travel

Featured Image: Exterior of the Venetian Las Vegas, the location of the Hospitality Show in their event space.

Introduction

Hello & welcome, I am Anthony Solhtalab, and I run a hospitality industry & travel blog, AntSol Travel! I am based out of Anaheim, California, right down the street from Disneyland, Anaheim Convention Center, Angels Stadium, and Honda Center. I typically write & film travel blogs about destinations & points of interest for my hotel coworkers & guests to know while in Orange County & Southern California. I also do press coverage of the hospitality industry as well, such as the Travel & Adventure Show, and now, the Hospitality Show!

I have been accepted to do press coverage of the newest hospitality industry conference, the Hospitality Show! It will be held at the Venetian Las Vegas Resort at their Venetian Expo Center, a 2.2 million square feet convention center. This is the inaugural year for the Hospitality Show, it was formed in collaboration with Hotel Management magazine by Questix & Lodging Magazine by the American Hotel & Lodging Association. After my success with my last press coverage of the Travel & Adventure Show, I applied & received a press pass for the Hospitality Show. I am honored to do press coverage for the show and ready to meet & greet industry colleagues and interview them.

For the Hospitality Show, I accumulated several interviews for my video & blog, which I will interview as if I am formulating my hypothetical hospitality management & hotel brands, and how each company they work for work & integrate with a management company planning to franchise with a brand, signing on a company to use their product usage at the facilities with new hotel brands, or franchising a hotel brand.

About Me!    

For those who I met at the Hospitality Show, you can get to know me better! Check out my about me page for more details.

Ever since I was a kid, I loved the travel experience of being on the road with my family traveling around California, my favorite part was the hotels! I loved the warmth & welcoming experience that the staff brought to us & every guest that they worked with to make every stay memorable. Along with the grandeur & amenities of the hotels, and the destination it was in. Back then, I did not even think having a career in hospitality was a feasible career. Then I saw back in the early 2000s on Travel Channel’s Great Hotels with Samantha Brown, as she travel to many hotels & destinations, she interviewed managers of those properties. I thought it could be a viable career and I could return the favor of bringing a welcoming experience for the staff & guests I worked with every day. However, the engineering academy at my high school swayed me into that I could be an electrical engineer, and I would take mechanic, civil, computer, and electrical engineering classes with the same peers in my regular classes and engineering. I thought I could be a computer engineer and program hardware & software for computers. However, I just had a hard time in all of my classes in college at California State University, Sacramento for computer & electrical engineering. After that, I thought about what else could be a feasible career, then I thought about my experience growing up loving the experiences at hotels, and I want to give that experience back to everyone I work with. With my parent’s blessing, I switched my major focus to Hospitality, Travel, & Tourism Management in the Department of Recreation, Parks, and Tourism Management (RPTA) in the fall of 2016. Many of the papers for my RPTA classes are concepts that I can understand and work with better than engineering, I was able to write my papers with a breeze and especially loved writing in my hospitality management classes.

To read up on new updates in the hospitality industry, I read Hotel Management magazine by Questix & Lodging Magazine by the American Hotel & Lodging Association. Back in 2016 & 2017, there were two huge articles I remember: Marriott – Starwood merger, and the neverending battle of resort/amenity/destination fees. 

Fast forward seven years through four different hotels in housekeeping, food & beverage, and guest services, including working the front desk myself through the pandemic. I have learned & grown a lot in my experience of working in the hospitality industry, both Hotel Management & Lodging Magazine were there to let me know what was new in the industry through the years. I am sort of returning the favor with AntSol Travel. I love learning about the hospitality, travel, and tourism industry, the guest experiences, and writing about them. However, my posts are currently skewed towards activities in Southern California, however, I can refocus the content on the hospitality industry for industry conferences and interviews.

When I worked in Sacramento for college & work in Elk Grove, in the suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area in Walnut Creek, located thirty miles away, or in Anaheim, down the street from Disneyland, my hotel front desk coworkers always struggles to find suggestions for guests about the area since they don’t really know the area really well. I used my writing and tourism research to work and made guides as tools to help them know about the area, which got acclaim from my managers and all the hotels I worked at.

AntSol Travel Blog Era!

In August of 2021, my sister & moved to Anaheim to fulfill our dreams of living & working right down the street from Disneyland, and I got an on-the-spot offer from one of the full-service hotels down the street from Disneyland! Overtime, as things reopened, everyone wanted to know what happens at Disneyland & the surrounding area for suggestions for attractions & restaurants to suggest to guests. I posed on my Instagram & on the front office Microsoft Teams chat about my latest adventure and about places & events I went to help inform my front desk coworkers & our guests about Southern California. Many of my coworkers & managers loved my content! I thought, “If they love it, many more people could love my content by expanding to a bigger social media market!” I expanded to YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, and even my own blog, which you are reading now. I have a Facebook page, however, that never got any traction.

The Travel & Adventure Show coverage was my first opportunity to practice doing conference press coverage, even though it is more for guests to learn about new destinations and plan for their next vacation. I had the opportunity to interview travel industry experts: Sarah Dandashy of Ask A Concierge, investigative travel journalist Peter Greenberg, and Pauline Frommer of Frommer Travel Guides. the coast of California to safari experiences in Africa. The video & blog posts got no traction whatsoever with the general public, however, it was a good experience in planning, interviewing, writing, and producing videos & blogs for a professional & conference setting. 

After I posted the blog, I saw that Questix and American Hotel & Lodging Association were teaming up to bring the first-ever, Hospailaity Show! A brand new hospitality conference would take place from June 27 to 29, 2023 at the Venetian Las Vagas resort’s convention center. It would feature a large expo hall, panels, and networking events. It costs at least $250 to attend at the early bird rate. Then I saw that I could apply as a press member and get a free press pass to the show. Free admission in exchange for coverage of the show, sign me up! I applied with my Travel & Adventure Show article and sent it in my application. A few weeks later, I was accepted for the press pass! AntSol Travel is even featured with 1000+ companies attending the conference. I was so excited to see the list and I could potentially network with them to do videos & articles, and get to meet my industry heroes! 

In the expo hall, there are going to be over 300 exhibitors, enough to outfit a hotel brand several times over. I want to interview different companies who are willing to interview that all can outfit a new hypothetical hotel brand and management. The company is AntSol Hospitality, with brands like Solhtalab Hotels, a full-service hotel named after me like John Willard Marriott & Conrad Hilton did for themselves. Along with select-service brands with breakfast like Holiday Inn Express & Fairfield, luxury brands like the Four Seasons & JW Marriott, extended-stay brands like Residence Inn & SpringHill Suites, and even economy brands like La Quinta & Days Inn.

Solhtalab Hotel is going to be planned to be a new independent full-service hotel brand in central business districts in the suburbs and downtown areas, averaging 500 guestrooms, over 50,000 sq ft of event space, four food & beverage outlets including a franchised cafe, high-tech & touchless as possible without displacing jobs & to expedited services, and there would be a moderate crime level so security personnel is needed at most hours in downtown areas. Guests staying at the full-service convention hotel I work at, primarily Disneyland guests, keep complaining that the guest room at 350 sq ft is too small for them & their growing family. The hotel is not meant for their demographic, but mostly business guests coming for a couple of nights for a conference. Solhtalab hotels will have varying levels of guest room types for all demographics. Ranging from standard guest rooms at 350 sq ft, longer stay suites at 500 sq ft with a parlor room & sleeper sofa, extended stay suites with a full kitchen, and at least 20 grand suites that can have connecting guest rooms that can to flexible to just living or meeting space, and the connecting room is extended stay. 

• AV: Audio & video for event spaces ranging from a projector connected to a laptop for a small meeting, to everything you need to throw the best event ever in your event space!
• Budgeting/forecasting: Plan on budgeting & forecasting the future revenue for the hotel to allocate money for your staff, property, and profit for owners
• Business intelligence: use business data from the past to plan for the future. 
• Channel management: Update your hotel inventory in real-time with your site, travel agents, and 3rd parties. It is crucial for this when you getting close to selling out that updates as soon as possible.
• CRM: Customer Relationship Management: How to manage reviews of your hotel & how you respond is crucial to help mend things with guests and how future guests would want to book.
• Digital signage: Have cool signage pointing guests to events at the hotel, wayfinding to other destinations in the hotel, and information about the area as well. 
• Engineering: What furniture & fixtures will be in the room & the building, and how will engineering maintain them?
• Guest management: How to keep in touch with guests online during their stay with online chats with apps or text.
• Housekeeping automation: expedite housekeeping with a live update tablet directly to the housekeeper for their next room to clean, not over the radio.  
• In-room technology: control the window shades from a tablet, make requests with a voice assistant, fitness equipment in the guestroom, and guests can use their streaming subscription. In-room technology moves at the speed of light, it is expensive to keep up with the latest in-room tech.
• Kiosks: want to get a copy of the room key without the shame of coming to the guest service agent for a copy? So many guests keep feeling shameful since they just remembered the room key was in the guest room key when the door closed & locked. You can just scan your ID at a kiosk & get a copy of your room key.
• Labor management: From onboarding, time clocks, payroll, benefits, and disembarking staff from your hotel, find the right labor management software to suit your company’s needs.
• Payment systems: How to take in payments for reservations, events, food & beverage, credit card authorizations, and more.
• PMS: Property Management System: Work guest’s reservations from input, check-in, room moves, add on loyalty account, guest needs, room types, and check out with receipt.  
• POS: Point of Sale, take in sales from food & beverage and retail outlets
• Revenue management: you now got all of this money from the hotel departments, how do you manage costs, room rates, wages, and up
• Security: prevent loss from crime with high-tech security, cameras, and personnel to get the job done, whether they are in-house or contracted out.

Interview questions: At VidCon, I learn many aspects of what is needed to cover for levels of knowledge of the topic, in this case, the view is going to skew more to the hospitality professionals’ more technical terminology, however, I will talk about it to a level that more curious viewer would understand. Some might not have stayed at high-end luxury hotels or not well-traveled enough to know the hotel experience. I will try to make it understandable for most people who are not hospitality professionals. Below are the general question sets to have a more uniform general set of questions to ask.

• Name, Job title, Company
• The elevator pitch of a company, product, and/or service that you provide that you can tell to hotel guests and then professionals? 
• What makes it different from your competitors, can they easily replicate it? Is the product patented & have trademarked?
• What are the benefits and drawbacks of the product or service?

I am happy to go to and do press coverage of the Hospitality Show as my first hospitality industry conference to attend, do press and network with many of my industry colleagues. Follow along with my adventures in real-time on my Instagram Stories.