For clients
Most agencies ask for your name, your budget and your dates, and give you a brochure. This gives you a figure first. It is built from trips we have actually booked and settled, not from a rate card, and you can leave without telling us who you are.
What a trip like this usually comes to
€11,000 to €18,000
For 2 people over 7 nights. A range, honestly, because the real number depends on which house says yes and when you go. Our fee is inside this, not added to it.
The fee
It runs from about five per cent down to one and a half, and it falls as the budget rises. It is not added on top and it is not billed by the hour. On an Italian trip we settled this summer it worked out at four per cent.
There is no membership, no joining fee and no annual retainer. We have been asked for all three and have declined each time. You pay when there is a project, and not otherwise.
Where we earn a commission from a house, that is disclosed. Where a rate is only available to us net, you get the net rate. We would rather tell you how the money works than have you wonder.
Why we stay small
The biggest listed concierge company in the sector earns roughly £175 a year from each active member. At that price nobody is remembering anything about you. Another lost more than £12m in a single year trying.
We are not trying to get big. One person knows your file, and the number of files is deliberately small. That is not a limitation we are apologising for, it is the product.
What you are paying for is judgement and accountability, not access. Access is free now and everyone knows it. Judgement is knowing that a house on a famous lake pays fifteen per cent through a booking channel we cannot use, so its headline generosity is worth nothing to you, while the house next door is quietly better and cheaper.
Tell us what you are thinking about. If we are not the right people for it we will say so, and point you at whoever is.
Or read The Concierge Chronicles first. It goes out every Friday and it is free.