What exactly is a concierge? Depends who you ask …
Entrepreneur Magazine's How To Start
a Personal Concierge Service
gives
the following definition. It's really
the best one I've ever read, and I've
read a lot of them!
Although more and more people are becoming familiar with the term "concierge," very few know where this customer-service based profession originated. The word "concierge" evolves from the French comte Des cierges, the "keeper of the candler," a term that referred to the servant who attended to the whims of visiting noblemen at medieval castles. Eventually, the name "concierge" came to stand for keeper of the keys at public buildings, especially hotels. There is even a famous prison in Paris that is called The Conciergerie, in honor of the warden who kept the keys and assigned cells to the inmates.
Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary offers this definition …
French, from Old French, prob from (assumed) Vulgar Latin conservius, alteration of Latin conservus fellow slave, from com- + servus slave. 1 : a resident in an apartment building especially in France who serves as doorkeeper, landlord's representative, and janitor. 2 : a usually multilingual hotel staff member who handles luggage and mail, makes reservations, and arranges tours
Lastly, a client of
mine from Mexico tells me that in his
country, the word “concierge” means
Janitor!!
Regardless of the origin, hotels from around the world were the first ones to adopt the concierge idea and offer the service to their guests. Today, independent concierge companies have brought this ancient service to the modern world so that now everyone has access to them.
So what exactly is a concierge?? I think the short version here is that it is simply another word for personal assistant.
The concierge industry itself is only about
20-25 years old and started with a few brave pioneers who took the hotel concierge idea and decided to offer it to the corporate world. I have been in the field since 1998 and when I started there were, perhaps,
two dozen or so concierge around the U.S. Today, I suspect there are thousands. I have nothing to base these numbers on except my personal experience in the field. You can actually see the phenomenal growth by looking at my company’s numbers. Triangle Concierge began in 1998 with a dozen clients. Today we have thousands of clients from
40 countries and every US state.
You can now find concierge everywhere ... in hospitals, malls, corporations, apartment buildings, office buildings, airports, colleges, associations, churches and on and on and on. You could sum up the state of the industry in two words ... extraordinary growth.
We all do a balancing act every day, and since most of us don’t have a personal assistant to make the phone calls and run the errands for us, we try and cram them into the weekend and on our lunch hour during the week. In fact, many people feel that there are simply not enough hours in the day to get everything done. Right?
Well help has arrived!!!
Although the concierge industry is fairly new, the number of companies that are catering to time-starved people is skyrocketing as is the customer demand for such businesses. Why? Simple. People are trying to squeeze 36 hours into a 24-hour day.
Here are a few services that are currently offered by concierge around the country:
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Search for tickets to concerts and special events
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Transportation Services
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Business Referral Service
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Restaurant Recommendations and Reservations
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Dry cleaning pick-up/delivery
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Grocery shopping
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Pet services
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Senior care
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Modified house sitting
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Travel and Vacation Planning
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Meeting and Event Planning
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