113 – TMG Hospitality Trailblazers: Alexi Khajavi

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

Join Suite Spot podcast host, Ryan Embree as he welcomes the President of Questex, Alexi Khajavi, as an official TMG Hospitality Trailblazer! These two hospitality-focused individuals discuss some incredible travel and tourism subjects in this episode, giving viewers great insight into the industry's current state. This episode is full of content from conversations regarding trends like staffing shortages, event & group travel, and an inside look at the inaugural launch of The Hospitality Show. Suite Spot Podcast · 113 - TMG Hospitality Trailblazers: Alexi Khajavi Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. 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, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, as always, Ryan Embree. We are gonna be continuing our TMG Hospitality Trailblazers series. We are having such fun with this series. Again, if this is the first time you're hearing this. This series is all about those people and groups that are pushing our hospitality industry forward. We've had a lot of hotel management companies, some brands on this. We're gonna take a little bit wider lens today. This is called TMG Hospitality Trailblazers. We're gonna look at the travel industry as a whole, and I think that's a perfect segue into an introduction to our guest, Alexi Khajavi, president Questex, hospitality, travel and wellness. Alexi, welcome to the Suite Spot. Alexi Khajavi: Thanks, Ryan. It's good to be here. Ryan Embree: Awesome. Well, this is your first time on the Suite Spot. We always love to essentially start our episodes the exact same way because as we know in hospitality, some people are born into it. Some people just find it, you know, some people, a lot of people say, "Hey, I want to be the guy at the hotel", or "I want to be the guy that's making all these memories within the travel industry". Where did your journey start and what led you to Questex? Alexi Khajavi: Well, you know, both my parents were big travelers, you know, so we, we were always, you know, trying to plan the next trip. So, travel's been a part of my life, you know, since being a little child. You know, ultimately, even professionally, however, I graduated from the UC of California. I came outta that and joined, you know, a tour operator that was doing some early educational trips to Cuba. Traveled around, you know, and was, and was paid to do. So, I then got into the early tech scene in, you know, the early .com, 1997 to 2001, a tech startup called unexplored.com. And really since then, I've, I've been in travel and I've been in on the marketing and sales side of travel and hospitality, lived overseas multiple times, running hotels, running airlines, and then ran an, an advertising agency based off of the travel and hotel space. So we were working with destinations, we were working with hotel companies, and then was introduced to Questex back in 2014. And the event space was something I didn't have a lot of direct experience in, but the ability to connect buyers and sellers, particularly in travel and hospitality, where face-to-face is so critical, was really the pinnacle moment for me to see that as being just an incredible culmination of my prior experiences, my love of travel, my love of hospitality, and the opportunity to bring both buyers and sellers together. And that's really been the beauty of Questex is, is that we inform, we connect, and we're able to do that both on the digital platform side as well as in the live engagement side. So it's a really nice, opportunity. I've been doing it, you know, for the last eight years now. Ryan Embree: Yeah. You know,