What a private concierge costs
Most concierge companies will not tell you what they charge. Here is the whole of it: what a membership costs, and what is billed separately.
Ask a concierge company what they charge and you will usually get a conversation rather than a number. There is a reason for that, and it is not always the flattering one.
There are two ways this industry makes money. The first is a fee you pay. The second is a commission the vendor pays — a percentage of the room, the table, the charter, returned to whoever sent the business. A great many firms run entirely on the second and charge you nothing at all, which sounds generous until you follow it through. If the hotel pays your concierge, the hotel paying the most is the hotel you hear about first. That is not advice. It is placement, and you are not the client in it.
We charge a membership fee, and that fee is the whole of our relationship with your money. Access is $1,000 a year. Reserve is $3,600 a year. Private Client is arranged privately, because the workload is genuinely different and publishing a number for it would be inventing one.
What the fee does not include is the thing itself. The dinner is the restaurant's price. The flight is the operator's price. The villa is the villa's. Those are billed to you directly by the people providing them, at what they charge, and we do not add a percentage on top. Where a supplier offers a commission we would rather see it come off your invoice than into our account, because that is the only arrangement under which our recommendation is worth reading.
For scale: a full-time personal assistant in New York costs well north of eighty thousand dollars a year, before anyone has worked out who covers the holidays. A membership is not the same service and does not pretend to be. It is the same instinct at roughly one per cent of the cost, and it does not need managing.
Whether it is worth it is arithmetic you can do without us. A year of Access is about the price of one good dinner for four, or one airport transfer arranged badly. If you travel twice a year and eat out on a Tuesday, it is not for you, and we would rather say that than sell it to you. If you are the person who has spent an hour on hold with an airline, or been told a table does not exist on a night you knew it did, the fee stops being the interesting part fairly quickly.
The number is not really the point, though it is worth having written down somewhere you can find it. The point is what the number buys, which is a desk that is on your side for the simple reason that nobody else is paying it.