Welcome to this strategic travel entrepreneur. My name is Rita Perez.

Hello.

I've been a travel Advisor for over 10 years and am navigating this winding road of entrepreneurship with you. I created this podcast because I wanted to share all the things I've learned from leaders both in and out of our industry that I really wish I would have known way back then. But alas, the important thing thing is I'm aware of them now and I want you to be too. Ready for this week's show. Let's jump in. Alrighty. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the podcast.

I'm super, super, super excited to have you here because there is an awesome event that is happening next week that you all need to be aware of and that is Host Week, so. So I have a very special guest, Steph Lee from Host Agency Reviews here with us today to tell us everything we need to. We need to know about registering and why we should be attending Host week. So welcome, Steph.

Thank you, Rita. Hello, everyone. So happy to be here today.

Yes, yes, that now I do. I want to like dive right in deep because I just registered for Host Week myself and when I registered and then looked up the lineup, it was not what I was expecting, which ended up being like a really great thing because like I told you, I thought it was just going to be host agencies talking about their agencies. And that is quite. It's a little bit, but it's way more than that. So tell us why you decided to put on Host Week and who is it for?

Why we decided to put on Host Week was, you know, about 80% of our visitors to the site, we get about 70,000 visits a month. And so 80% of those are people that are new to the industry or like first time visitors to the site. And like when you have 70,000 visits a month, even that 20% for experienced advisors is still a lot of advisors. And so what we did like last year was our first host week and our goal was to kind of bring, to recognize the hosted community. Everyone knows it exists within travel and it's a big thing, but it was like the celebratory thing where we're like recognizing different hosts and we're talking about like educating both new and experienced advisors. And last year was our first year and it was probably a better event for experience or, I'm sorry, new advisors, because it was a lot of host agencies or for someone that was looking to switch host agencies. But this year we really wanted to make it so it's much broader because we work with both new and experienced advisors. And so we wanted to add a lot of trainings and education, keynote speakers.

That's something that would be of interest to both new and experienced advisors. So we still have the host agency component where we're giving everybody the same questions and do like a 15 minute interview with them where you can get a flavor for them. But the, the other portions that we added this year is we have, we call them think tank. So they're kind of, we, we've got different sessions that people, we've got one from a travel attorney where people can learn about the four things that they. They need for that. We have things on how to tell your story. We have things. Mary, our editor, did one on kind of blogging.

So there's a lot of different subjects that are helpful for an agency of.

Any level that I was going to say, who is this more tailored to? But I could see every different stage being assisted for Host Week.

Yeah, that's kind of the goal behind it. And, you know, we got a bunch of keynote speakers. There's a keynote speaker every day. And they, you know, we have Vicki Fried coming on from Royal Caribbean just to kind of lift everybody's spirits and talk about. We have Mark Meter from ASTA who's kind of talking about what's ASTA done in the last year for advisors, what's on the agenda this year, and the importance of. I think we all realized when the pandemic demolished our industry, how important having lobbying on the Hill is. So making sure that people are aware of asta, give them an opportunity. Joan.

And we have a lot of specials, so we do like Host Week exclusive specials.

Mm.