Are Most Concierge Services Worthless Today?

I was thinking about services that hotel staff provide that used to be valuable but in our day and age are now almost worthless. In the past, when you traveled to a new place, you would want the help of the hotel staff in a bunch of things that now you can find out with the benefit of the internet. These services include

· Restaurant recommendations and reservations – You can look up restaurant reviews on Yelp or Trip Advisor and the get benefit of hundreds of people. You can then make reservations at these restaurants online at sites like OpenTable.

· Transportation arrangements – Uber makes your life so much easier

· Maps and Directions – Google Maps provide great directions for driving, mass transportation and walking.

· Advice on local attractions – Once again, online reviews provide so much information. You can also ask ChapGPT or Google Gemini for advice. You can then book events on Viator.

· Tickets to local events – Ticketmaster and Stubhub offer so many event reservations.

The real issues that I have with the recommendations of the hotel staff is that they have biases that may be driven by those places (like restaurants) nearby or that they have some form of relationship with. In some cases, they are compensated by the establishments for driving business to their place. 

Also, the hotel staff are one or two people and your opinion may vary greatly from the opinion of one person. With online review sites, you get the opinions of hundreds that should account for the biases of all these people.

I also tried using the American Express Concierge service to make a reservation at a fancy restaurant that is really difficult to obtain. It turns out that the AMEX Concierge service did no better than I did in getting the reservation. So in effect, are they any better?

I think that value of concierge services end up being greatly diminished due to the advent of technology so that you end up so many options. So unless you have a need for some specialized services, you can get the help you need with a click of keyboard button rather than waiting online for the help of the concierge.

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