I can calculate how long I have had an American Express card in Decades not years. During most of that time I have been aware some of the benefits offered that I never took advantage of. One of those benefits is the personal concierge service. For years I knew it could be a valuable tool yet I only once used it. Thinking back I cannot come up with a good reason not to use this service. Maybe it was because I am a control freak. I like researching things on my own. When I worked at Datastream Systems they had their own travel people in house. The job required constant travel. I still would research what I wanted and call the travel people and tell them to book me on specific flights. So either I was a control freak or just lazy not wanting to talk to someone to make plans with a concierge. Either way this potentially valuable service went unused. With an upcoming trip I decided to change that.
My mom came to visit and we all went to Paris. She has been great and offered M and I to go on a date night while we are there. Not knowing the city i figured why shouldn’t i try the American Express concierge and see what they can come up with based on the criteria we have. We want a restaurant no more than 30-45 min from our hotel on the metro. We are looking for a French place known for their sea food. We also want a place that has good cocktails. I also provided the two dates we were looking at for possible reservations. The requirements were simple enough. I did not want to spend hours on tripadvisor or whatever review site is popular in Paris trying to find a place.
The call to the Amex Concierge was simple enough. Using the mobile I had on file and a preset code I created when setting up the account I was authenticated and ready to go when the representative got on the phone. When I spoke to the representative I gave her my criteria and she said she was going to email or call me with options. I chose for her to email me.
Once i was done with American Express I decided to source options from somewhere else and turn this experiment into a full fledge comparison. I just got a VISA card that offered VISA Infinite concierge. I was curious if they were any good either so I figured why not try them out too. Calling VISA was slightly less straight forward. I had to provide my card number twice to an automated system. Once I got someone on the phone I gave the VISA people the same criteria. The lady i spoke with was super friendly and helpful. Like the person I spoke to at AMEX she offered to call me back or email me. Again I opted for an email.
American Express sent me an email within an hour of our call with four options. They also gave me a PDF guidebook of restaurants where they have special offers in Europe. One specific thing that was annoying was I told them we were going Sunday or Monday night. One of their suggestions wasn’t even open those days. All the options they gave us did look great. We had two favorites right away from the list we were given.
Visa infinite said they would send details up to four hours later. Because of the time we called I didn’t read their email until the next day. They sent a PDF with the options included. The format was definitely nicer looking then AMEX. After looking over the options M didn’t like any of them. I didn’t have time to look at it myself so I won’t directly comment on the quality. I will say that the customer service rep I spoke to from the visa infinite pointed out that many places are closed Sunday or Monday in France and would be on the lookout for that in selecting options. That was a good catch especially since the American Express rep sent us an option we couldn’t even use.
if i was rating on how long it took to get my information, AMEX won. They were quick and looked pretty spot on even though they skewed a little pricier than I asked for. For presentation of the information VISA one out over AMEX. It was easier for me to understand the visa concierge as well. That was because it was during US business hours and I got a native English-speaking person in the US. The American Express concierge I got someone who was native Italian speaking so it was a little more difficult for me to understand however she actually lived in Paris and was very knowledgeable of the neighborhood we were staying in. I’ll give both of them even scores for different reasons.
In the end I’ll give American Express the win since M like the restaurant options. When I called back to book the reservation we wanted to put me on hold to try to reach the restaurant in real time. They were closed. The lady I was speaking to quickly checked and confirmed that there was availability and we could book online. She offered to call back later when they were open to book the reservation directly or to have us book online ourselves. For whatever reason they were unable to book electronically for us. It was trivial for me to make the reservation so I just did it myself.
While I was sorting out the details for dinner in Paris we were also looking for somethingg to do for an upcoming date night in London right before our trip. Having my mom visiting is a huge treat that we can get some date nights and I get to see my mom. It’s been 6 months since we last saw her.. For our London date night M’s local friends gave her several ideas. One of them was Sushisamba. It looked great to me so we wanted to get a reservation. There are online reservation system said they were unavailable night we wanted to go. I figured it was a long shot however I called the concierge folks at American Express to see if they had any special way to get reservations. That is what concierge is known for anyway, right? For this request I only called the American Express people. I will try the VISA people again but for now AMEX seemed to be “get” what we were looking for. When I called the lady I spoke with confirmed that they do have relationships with many restaurants and had fielded several requests in the past for this particular one that we wanted to go to. After some checking unfortunately she was unable to get us a table. Knowing that they could be useful in the future I file that information away.
Since SushiSamba was not available to us we still needed to find a place to go on our date night in London. When we got the recommendations from American Express for the Paris date night they also sent along a PDF. It listed restaurants in Europe where they had special relationships. Each one had some sort of discount or deal through American Express. Looking through that PDF I saved several places that looked really good for us to try at some point around London. I showed M my top three places I liked as date night options and she agreed that my first option would be really cool. It was the bar restaurant at the Savoy hotel, Kasper’s at the Savoy. Now that we had settled on a new destination I went online to try to book a reservation. For the day that we wanted the only offered counter service. For date night I prefer the table so that wasn’t going to work. Our date was not flexible. It was that night or not at all. I then decided to try American Express again. The lady I spoke to this time was not sure if they had a relationship with Kaspar’s. With a little bit of digging she confirmed that they did have a relationship. She was able to get us a table around the time we wanted to go. That was pretty awesome.
I’m writing this before having gone to either of the restaurants we booked through American Express concierge. The overall experience was also extremely positive. That is saying a lot for me since I refuse to even call a restaurant for take away. Let alone trying to help me with specific details of a request. Unless the recommendations turn out to be horrible for some reason I anticipate using them again. I also can’t see how those recommendations could be bad. They gave us the ideas however checking out TripAdvisor both places have fantastic reviews. The fact that they can also get me into a place that I could not get into myself was pretty awesome.
This is one of those things where I’ve known for ages I should be trying yet I didn’t. If I do start using the more I will wonder why I was so lazy over the years when I had it as an option.