Inside the rise of private concierge services for the ultra‑wealthy

Private concierge services, which can cost more than $50,000 a year, make impossible dinner reservations and finagle special treatment. In certain circles, they've become a common luxury. (Leon Edler/The New York Times)

Imagine that you are skiing in the French Alps over Christmas when you are invited to a friend’s private island in the Maldives and wish to travel immediately. A private jet gets you there fine but there is a small wrinkle: Your beach wardrobe remains marooned in London and, because of the holidays, cannot be transferred for a week by conventional services. So you call upon an unconventional one. You call your private concierge.

Private concierges are what they sound like: an expensive team of dedicated assistants paid to do your bidding. And among the very wealthy, they’re a common luxury.

“I no longer have to explain what a personal concierge is to friends,” said Lauren Wilt, the CEO of a concierge service called Quintessentially. “It’s a more well-known and understood category.”

For up to $75,000 per year these firms will book impossible-to-get dinner reservations, procure your child’s birthday present or personally courier your beach wardrobe from England to the Maldives over the holidays, as Stuart McNeill, the founder of Knightsbridge Circle, said he once did for a client.

“We fix problems,” said McNeill, who is based in London. The super rich, evidently, have a lot of problems: In the U.S., McNeill said his firm doubled its clientele in the past year and plans to open offices in Dallas, Singapore and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Concierge services vary by size and level of service. Knightsbridge Circle, a boutique firm that charges $50,000 a year plus an initiation fee, has only 120 members. But others, like Quintessentially and Velocity Black, have thousands. Banks like Wells Fargo, Capital One and Chase offer subscriptions to such services, either in-house or through third parties, as a perk to high-end customers. Some event hosts, like Art Basel, also subscribe, so they can pamper their VIPs.

These firms congregate among the moneyed corners of the globe: New York, Los Angeles, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. They maintain contacts in well-to-do holiday destinations: buzzy restaurants and chefs in Nantucket, Massachusetts, luxury goods dealers in St. Barts, architects and designers in Cozumel, Mexico.

“It’s a very hard customer to win and a very expensive customer to lose,” said Sylvain Langrand, the CEO of Velocity Black, a private concierge service that was acquired by Capital One in 2023. (Other elite credit cards, like the American Express Centurion and the Mastercard Black Card, offer private concierge services too.)

One such customer is Silver Kung, a Taiwanese hedge fund manager based in Hong Kong. He said he sampled a few firms before settling on two: Rosemarie Hospitality, a boutique firm, and Velocity Black. The latter is offered as a perk by R360, a social club he belongs to for people with a net worth of at least $100 million. He also has opened accounts for his two daughters.

Kung said he uses Velocity Black mostly for booking restaurants and sorting out travel logistics. Rosemarie is for bigger asks. Recently, the firm arranged an after-hours visit to the Louvre for his family.

“Velocity is like my Tesla that I drive every day,” Kung said. “Rosemarie is my special car, like a Maserati.”

Concierge firms compete in offering what Wilt called “hyper-personalization,” knowing and acting upon clients’ individual quirks, desires, tastes and bothers. “Say we’ve booked you at a restaurant and we know you are a sushi fanatic so there’s a tuna tartare waiting for you at the table when you arrive,” she said.

Services rendered can be comically mundane. McNeill recalled dispatching someone in Mykonos, Greece, to wait in place of a client for their dinner table to free up. Wilt, who calls her agents “lifestyle managers,” recalls that, after a client’s child became enamored with “a specific breed of penguin,” Quintessentially arranged a private experience involving the breed at an Atlanta zoo.

Agents are different, said Wilt, from hotel concierges, who field “rapid-fire, transactional requests with a new set of clients every day, whereas our service is that we get to know you and build that relationship for many years.” Beyond hotels, the industry’s talent pool draws from personal assistants, celebrity and athlete managers and luxury sales professionals.

Firms make money through annual subscription fees: $12,000 to $44,000 for Quintessentially; $3,100 for Velocity Black plus a $900 initiation fee. They may also receive commissions through hotel and other travel bookings.

“We say that the membership fee keeps the lights on and then our profit is based on the activity of clients,” McNeill said.

Increasingly, firms partner with luxury brands like Sotheby’s, Formula One and Aston Martin. In this way, they can offer members “exclusive” and “red carpet” access to events like the U.S. Open or New York Fashion Week or access to hard-to-acquire luxury products. “Part of the value in our service is to position ourselves with the CEO of a brand, do some events, make informal introductions and then let our members build a relationship,” McNeill said. That relationship, it is hoped, will translate into ready access to products. Avoiding tackiness requires deft footing.

“We try to be very careful in every experience or access we give — we never want to try to be selling something,” Langrand said. “It’s about finding a way to do it in a very bespoke and meaningful way.”

Kung has used his private concierge to proffer only one product: a high-end golf putter that was not sold in Asia. His agent located a dealer in London and had it shipped.

“Of course, I can reach out myself,” he laughed. “But right now I’m spoiled.”

Written by: Brent Crane

Graphic by: Leon Edler

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