AntSol Travel

“AntSol Travel: Exploring the hospitality, travel, & tourism industry from staff & guest experience.”

I am Anthony Solhtalab or AntSol for short. Welcome to my travel blog, AntSol Travel! Working in hotels in Anaheim, Orange County, California, I use my writing, photography, and video production skills to showcase places in greater Southern California to my hotel coworkers to help them learn and give our hotel guests ideas to explore SoCal and OC while they are here. When I explore outside of Orange County, I research the destination and write about them & how they relate to the hospitality, travel, and tourism industry for the staff & guest experience.

Content ranges from videos about destinations and the attractions of the area that guests come to see throughout the year. Events and fan conventions guests come to once a year, mostly hospitality industry & fan conventions. Transportation that moves residents and guests around the region to get to those destinations and events. Sometimes I want to relax from traveling & writing and play some video games.

Come for the relaxing rail fanning trains of Southern California, the thrills of theme parks, and the competition of video games. Stay to learn about planning for your trip to Southern California and learning about the hospitality travel, & tourism industry. It is a brand that is diverse in interests, as I am.

Growing up in Concord, CA, about 30 miles east of San Francisco, my family & I attended many sporting events, concerts, museums, and tourist locations, visiting family members throughout the state, taking public transportation, and more. The Concord Pavilion was even up the street from my parent’s house. We especially loved visiting Disneyland, since we loved getting to experience new and exciting experiences from Disney to experience together as a family. We loved visiting San Diego as it is one of my favorite destinations that we would visit annually as there are many attractions, take the San Diego Trolley, go to San Diego Padres baseball games, go to the beaches, and now go out for the vibrant nightlife.

Wanting to capture and take home the experiences got my interest in photography, starting with my second cell phone with first exportable photos, the Sony Ericsson W580i. I later progressed by getting a point-and-shoot camera, long zoom point-and-shoot, DSLR, and now iPhone 14 Pro Max & GoPro Hero 9 to easily capture, edit, and post my travel experiences.

When I went to college in the fall of 2013 at California State University, Sacramento (CSUS), I originally went for computer & electrical engineering, as I loved using computers, however, little did I know that the user-friendliness of using electronics is much different than designing & programming electronics to make them user friendly was something I could not personally work with. I loved learning about sciences and engineering causally like going to a science museum or watching one of my favorite shows, Mythbusters. However, learning, applying the ideas on projects, and getting tested on the subjects was a different story. I had a hard time with just math, sciences, and computer programming classes. During then, I attended the school’s robotics club from the Fall of 2013 to the Spring of 2014, where we designed 1-pound robots for an annual robotics competition that’s kin to Battle Bots. I also managed the Facebook Page for the Fall of 2014, this was my first experience in making social media content.

Thinking about what else I could do that is viable for my major & career, I was inspired by my love of travel experience to get my bachelor’s in hospitality & tourism management, focusing on hotel management in the Department of Recreation, Parks, & Tourism Management in the class of 2018. Hospitality & Tourism Management became its own major after my graduation.

I worked in select-service hotel brands in housekeeping, food & beverage, and front desk, with some occasional building maintenance as needed over the last six years. Starting at the Hampton Inn & Suites Elk Grove, about 20 miles from Sacramento State, where I did housekeeping, breakfast bar, and front desk for my pre-internship hours. I originally applied for the front desk, however, I did not have any work experience at the time and they turned me down for the front desk. They offered me instead to start work in housekeeping since I wanted to go into hotel management, I am grateful that they took a chance on me.

I started as a houseman who would do laundry, janitorial, and item request delivery on the weekends. The worst part was that microwaves & minifridges were not standard in the guestrooms, I had to deliver & take them back to storage after the guest checked out. I also got my first and only experience in food & beverage by assisting the breakfast staff with prep, setting out, and clean up of the breakfast area, only on Tuesday mornings as we had plenty of business guests come in on Monday nights to work in Sacramento or Elk Grove offices.

My internship for school was in the summer of 2018 at Tanaya Lodge at Yosemite, owned and operated by Deleware North, as a front desk intern, where I worked the front desk on a daily basis, and wrote papers for my school professor every two weeks. My project for Tenaya Lodge was a presentation to showcase improvements with one of my interns who worked in housekeeping. Deleware North provided housing for all interns as the resort as we located way up in the Sierra Nevada mountains, outside of Yosemite National Park, we at least had dial-up internet to work on our school papers and stay connected.

Then the Ferguson Fire happened and eventually closed down Yosemite National Park, even though it was not close to the main valley area where the attractions are, the smoke was really bad. Due to that, I was on the first and only furlough of my career, then I eventually quit and moved back home. My internship was considered completed with all of my school papers but fell short of work hours 9 of 10 weeks by the fire, considered an act of God at that point.

After my internship, I moved back home to Concord and worked the front desk at the Holiday Inn Express Walnut Creek in Central Conta Costa County, located 30 miles from San Francisco. From September 2018 to June 2021, I worked the front desk in a suburban area next to Interstate 680, where we would get business people on the weekdays who worked in offices in the area or take the BART train to San Francisco as an alternative to expensive rates of the city, medical offices & facilities in the vicinity, landscapers, and construction projects. Guests on the weekend would stay for the Bay Area concerts & sports as an alternative to the expensive hotels near the venues, and guests would visit family in the area as well.

During then, I had to deal with many things such as power outages, water outages, small fires, ant colonies that kept popping up (a guest left an open container of Costco rotisserie chicken in their guestroom, you can guess what happened next), problematic guests, and even quell out of west coast region guests after a 4.5 magnitude earthquake that many that were scared out of their wits since many of them have not experienced an earthquake. Many things, including the earthquakes, happened in the evening when I was working the desk myself, so I am experienced in making quick informed decisions myself in moments of crisis.

I even worked during the 2020 Pandemic closures, managing things when managers and my coworkers were not there due to low occupancy & housing primarily medical staff, thankfully, things improved over time.

I also worked part-time in a destination marketing internship with Visit Concord during the Fall of 2019 since I want to work in destination marketing more.

I attempted to blog on this site back in 2019, but then I stopped since I lost the motivation to post.

Then in September 2021, I moved down with my sister to Anaheim since she got a new office job, and I got an on-the-spot offer for guest services at a full-service hotel, thanks to my knowledge, skills, and experience. This became a full-circle experience for us, as my sister & I had always dreamed of moving to Orange County and being close to Disneyland was the icing on the cake. 

Many of my hotel coworkers are either too busy with family to visit destinations that our guests want to visit or don’t know how to articulate the places, especially about updates at Disneyland Resort & many regional attractions. Since I am not tied to take care of a family and have some wiggle room to buy a Disneyland Magic Key annual pass, I use my knowledge of the area & creativity to kick-start AntSol Travel, overtime, creating Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube videos to give me the motivation to kick-start the blog again.

Welcome to AntSol Travel! Exploring and informing about places to visit, events, & transportation of the greater Southern California region, to inform my coworkers, guests, and readers like you. Thank you!

What I Do

Capture and write about locations in Southern California, primarily Orange County. Showcasing destinations, events, and transportation in the region. Destinations with Disneyland Resort, Orange County Parks, beach cities, and more, as Disney & beaches are a huge tourism draw. Events with local major & minor league sports, concerts, fan conventions, and more, as it draws local and visiting fans far & wide for the duration of the event. Transportation on the good & bad of the region via foot, bike, public transportation, and automobiles, as it shows how we move around the region for residents and visitors.