At your service for tickets, tee-offs and tables

by Ed Charles
ALL platinum credit cards offer a concierge service, apart from the American Express credit card product.
Amex reserves the concierge service for the top echelon of charge card holders. That’s those with the $1000-a-year platinum charge card or the $4300 Centurion cards.
Concierge services also overlap with fine dining, ticket-booking and club schemes run by Mastercard and Visa.
The Mastercard Moments and Applause schemes offer premium tickets for shows and can book some of the unbookable tables at restaurants, some of which offer discounts and special menus.
Visa card holders can enjoy Visa Platinum Golf, dining and club experiences. The golf program offers complimentary tee-offs all year round at more than 25 of Asia’s best greens and exclusive access to some of the world’s most celebrated golf clubs.
Both Mastercard and Visa also offer their own concierge service.
Jeremy, who doesn’t disclose his surname, works in the Westpac Altitude Platinum concierge team.
He says the service becomes busy towards weekends, especially when special events are on.
People call for emergency gifts for husbands or wives, and sometimes strange shopping requests, he says.
One customer, for example, wanted help finding male mice of a particular breed and colour on short notice — before the kids arrived home from school.
But he says most requests are for restaurant tables and tickets. When ticket sales for an event open, the whole team can get on the phone to secure the best tickets.
“When you are calling (for tickets) on your own it is pure luck as to whether you can get a good seat or not,” he says.
Gaby Milling, who heads the concierge team servicing platinum charge card and Centurion members at American Express, says preferential ticketing is a favoured request.
“If Robbie Williams or Kylie Minogue announces a concert we get a lot of calls from card members to book those,” she says.
“Ticketing is very hot because you can’t get it anywhere else.
“They have to go to Ticketek themselves and they have got to line up themselves.”
Some card issuers will have special access to tickets unable to the public through sponsorship arrangements.
Others are able to book the best seats in town, thanks to bulk buying power.
Citibank head of cards Roy Gori says the concierge service will do almost anything within reason, and can be a big help when there are overseas emergencies, thanks to the worldwide language pool that each service has.
“The concierge is where you have an assistant at your beck and call.
“The range of uses that we have for that facility is amazing.
“We had a cardholder who was sick with a fever in Nairobi, Kenya — it was possibly even malaria or dengue — and the cardholder wanted details including the general practitioner in Nairobi or a disease specialist that specialised in Western care.”
The Paris office got all the details within an hour.
Milling says there is almost no limit to what her team will organise, from weddings and funerals through to family birthdays.
“We will go as far as we can as long as it’s legal, ethical and moral,” she says. “We try and facilitate any request.”
While the bread and butter work of her 30-strong Australian team is ticketing, flowers and restaurant bookings, they have also been brought in to manage major events.
One customer asked the team to arrange a wedding in Italy where champagne flutes were sourced from three different countries.
The concierge team had translators, wedding organisers and photographers all working together.
The day teams were doing all the research. All the requests and the follow-ups were implemented by the night team, during what was daytime in Italy.
“That’s not an everyday sort of thing but that’s the sort of length we will go to,” Milling says.
The team can also called on to help with shopping. Sometimes it might be locating a pair of the latest black patent leather boots from abroad. Once it was locating a bikini seen in an old edition of Italian Vogue in Germany.
But mostly it involves shopping. Thanks to relationships with toy shops they can supply lists of popular toys and gadgets, source them and have them wrapped and delivered.
The American Express concierge service has the edge on fine dining. For example, it has several tables for four at Tetsuya’s, which has a six-week waiting list, on permanent reservation, available until 10am each morning.
“If you were a card member and wanted to go to Tetsuya’s for dinner on Thursday night — in fact we hold more than one table at Tetsuya’s — we could book that table for you,” Milling says.