Meet Anthony Solhtalab Solhtalab | Hotel Guest Services & Travel Blogger

We had the good fortune of connecting with Anthony Solhtalab Solhtalab and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Anthony Solhtalab, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
I am Anthony Solhtalab, I run AntSol Travel, a local & travel blog, primarily posting on Instagram, about my adventures and insights about places, destinations, and events in Southern California (SoCal). I would have started my masters for hospitality & tourism management in 2021. However, my new employer there will not allow me to cut a day of work for school, so I had to drop out since it was hard for me to balance both personally. I still loved writing during my free time about places in SoCal, now without the restrictions of the class papers, what is now AntSol Travel.
I now work full-time in guest services for the Anaheim Marriott hotel in Anaheim, the city is home of Disneyland, Anaheim Convention Center, Los Angeles Angels baseball team, Anaheim Ducks hockey team, and a drive or train ride to many SoCal destinations for a day or overnight trip. Furthermore, I use my knowledge through writing and posting for AntSol Travel to inform myself, my family, friends, coworkers, and guests about the places, destinations, and events in Southern California.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
As a social media travel blogger on AntSol Travel, I am relatively starting out in since I only have around 140 followers at the moment. They mostly consist of friends, family, coworkers, and random companies who do follow sprees since I like content from a page follow. I still pour a lot of time & effort into the posts since I love to explore, research, and write about the areas. It fun for me to help occupy my leisure time that would have been filled with video games instead.

I treat posts like I am writing a term paper about my adventure. From graduating from Sacramento State’s Department of Recreation, Parks, and Tourism Management, I helped learn about the behind-the-scenes of specific industries of parks & recreation management, outdoor recreation, recreation therapy, and hospitality & tourism management. I would learn how they work and write about them. This also helps me gain more interest & appreciation for those industries as well.
This transferred to my posts to look at places at an operations level of the company & place, such as why concessions cost much more at events, due to needing to make a profit, ever-increasing costs of labor and ingredients, and attendees are a captive audience that cannot go out to get food at venues without in & out access with the current ticket.

For me, writing is always a long process, feeling like I am writing a term paper every time I post. I start writing about it for preliminary research and information, take plenty of pictures & videos while there, especially pictures of informational plaques, take mental notes of the place and what is occurring, and start writing on the way back home or at home if I drove there, make sure to check if all information is correct & true, and proofread several times before posting as my writing are always initially terrible in the first drafts. This interview draft took me a couple of days to initially write, but took many revisions to add on and edit it to its current version.

Moving to Anaheim worked out for me well for AntSol Travel. I have so many places I can go visit and write a quick review or write an update, such as Disneyland Resort, Angels Stadium, Honda Center, and the Anaheim Convention are all just down the street from my apartment. I can do quick trips about events in town, changes at Disneyland, and fun places at various parks and cities in the county. Likewise, I am just a quick drive or train ride to many destinations in Southern California on my days off.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Anaheim & Orange County are destinations in of themselves itself with many sports, attractions, and restaurants in the surrounding area. They can stay in one of over a hundred hotels in the Anaheim Resort area, such as the Anaheim Marriott a 1,000+ room convention hotel, with 169,000 sq. ft. of event space, located next to the Anaheim Convention Center, and a mile away from Disneyland. If they want to go to Disneyland, let’s go, since it the reason that the area is a huge attraction, however, I have to go in moderation since I get too tired of Disneyland after going there too often in a short period of time. If they don’t want to go to Disneyland, there are many other things to do in Orange County. Anaheim is home of Angel Stadium, home of the Los Angeles Angels baseball team, and Honda Center, home of the Anaheim Ducks hockey team. Both teams keep the area alive sports wise, all year round.

Eat & shop at three areas in Anaheim, Downtown Disney, the Gardenwalk, and CTR Center, the branding name for downtown Anaheim. Downtown Disney is good if you don’t have time to go into the parks but want a taste of it with the food and buy a few items at the World of Disney store, The Gardenwalk competes with Downtown Disney, with many shops & restaurants. They also house the House of Blues & the AMC movie theater that were kicked out of Downtown Disney a few years ago due to initial plans to build a hotel on the site that eventually fell through. CTR Center was the city of Anaheim’s way to redevelop the downtown area to a denser mix use area, along with many new shops & restaurants for the resort area guests and the city office works to eat & shop. One place that opened was the Packing House, a former Sunkist citrus packing house, that was converted into a food hall, which houses twenty-six food & beverage outlets, so there is something to eat for everyone. Orange County got its name from the many citrus farms in the area from when it was founded in the late 1800s to the 1960s, giving the name of the county.

If you want to get out into the wilderness for a bit, Orange County Parks system has twenty-three inland parks to go hiking & mountain biking. The beach cities of Orange County are always fun with the beach & surf, and the many places to explore.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Everyone from my family, friends, coworkers, and managers who took a change on me & hired me.

I was born and raised in the suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area in California. My mom & dad would take my sister & me to see family around California, sporting events, concerts, and theme parks.
My family especially loved going to Disneyland, as we would go there every year to take in the family fun of the familiar & new experiences.

While growing up, I loved watching Travel Channel & Food Network in the late 2000s with personalities like Samantha Brown, Anthony Bourdain, Emeril Lagasse, Alton Brown, and more. I would opt to watch those two channels more than the children’s TV stations, dreaming of going to destinations around the world to places that my family did not really want to visit. No one, including me growing up, thought that I could have a career in the hospitality industry at the time.

While in college for Hospitality & Tourism Management at Sacramento State’s Department of Recreation, Parks, & Tourism Management, I managed the social media pages for one of the clubs I participated in. I learned about writing content for the group and posted great content with high praise from my classmates.

I did all that along with working part-time as a houseman, breakfast bar attendant, and later front desk agent at the Hampton Inn in Elk Grove for my pre-internship hours, about twenty miles away from school. The manager there took a chance on me since I never had work experience at that point as originally applied as a front desk agent, thankfully, he hired me as a houseman to do laundry & janitorial work to get experience before being promoted to the front desk several months later.

After my senior year, I did my summer internship at Tenaya Lodge, located a few miles from Yosemite National Park’s south gate. I worked at the front desk and wrote super analytic papers about the resort & operations for my professor. I worked on a presentation with a co-intern that was in housekeeping about improvements that could be feasible for both departments.

After my internship, I moved back to my parent’s house in the San Francisco Bay Area in Concord, about 30 miles from San Francisco. I worked the front desk at the 169 room, Holiday Inn Express Walnut Creek. We were always busy with business guests going to work in the business & doctor’s offices in the area, along with taking the BART train from Walnut Creek to San Francisco. Along with leisure, guests seeing friends & family in the area. My coworkers would constantly refer guests to me for general information for going into and going to all the San Francisco leisure destinations such as the Golden Gate Bridge, Pier 39, the Embarcadero, the Painted Lady’s, and more. This helped me to dig more into being a tourist in the city.

To get experience in tourism management, in the fall of 2019, I volunteered and then later worked part-time at my hometown’s destination market organization (DMO), Visit Concord. I learned about the marketing side of DMO by working at the public outreach tables during the farmer’s market and working on marketing materials in the office.

When the COVID-19 closures came in 2020, the Holiday Inn Express was still open for the four resident guests who stayed there for years beforehand, as well as medical staff working in the hospitals in Walnut Creek.

I wanted to get my master’s in hospitality & tourism management to look more appealing to bigger hotels after things started to reopen in 2021. I was accepted into an online program and later moved to Anaheim with my sister in August 2021. However, I had to drop out of the program as I got an on-the-spot offer for my now current job at the Anaheim Marriott as a guest experience expert (hotel’s front desk & phone lines), however, they had a stipulation that I have to have all forty hours a week, and I could not manage my time working full time and schooling part-time.

Recently, more of my coworkers caught wind of AntSol Travel and were intrigued with my content. Since many of them, majority were born & raised in SoCal, still not too familiar with the Anaheim Resort area and the immediate area, I put quick information on daily basis though our front office online chats to acts as a familiarization tour for my coworkers to help them learn about the area and to help them inform the hotel guests about the area.

Website: https://linktr.ee/antsoltravel

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/antsoltravel/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-solhtalab/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/antsoltravel/photos/?ref=page_internal

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1k_0u5HvNnsSDNRRZX9v9A

Image Credits
Profile Picture by Ron Olcott. All other images by Anthony Solhtalab.