The word has been stretched to cover everything from a hotel desk to an app. Here is the version that is worth paying for.
Ask ten people what a concierge does and you will get ten answers, most of them about restaurant bookings. That is a fair description of a hotel desk. It is not a description of a private concierge, and the gap between the two is where most disappointment happens.
A private concierge is not a booking service. Booking is the easy part, and increasingly a machine does it. What a client is actually buying is judgement: someone who knows that the restaurant everyone recommends is badly run on Sundays, that the villa with the famous view has a road behind it, and that the driver who is cheapest in Marrakech is cheapest for a reason.
The three things that matter
The first is access. Not the theatrical kind — the practical kind. A table held for twenty minutes past the cut-off. A suite released because someone made a call. This comes from relationships that took years to build and can be lost in one bad introduction, which is why a serious concierge is careful about whom they send you to.
The second is anticipation. The request you make is rarely the whole job. A dinner reservation implies a car, a time, a preference about where you sit, and someone paying attention to whether the evening is running late. Being asked for one thing and delivering the six things around it is most of the craft.
The third is discretion, and it is the one clients test hardest. A concierge who name-drops their other clients to impress you is telling you exactly how they will talk about you.
What it is not
It is not a status symbol, and the better firms are slightly embarrassed by the ones that market it as one. It is not a replacement for an assistant who knows your calendar. And it is not unlimited — anyone promising that anything is possible is either inexperienced or about to disappoint you expensively.
The honest description is narrower and more useful: a concierge buys back your attention. The measure of one worth keeping is how little of your time each request costs you by the third month.
