From booking you into hotels and hard-to-get-into restaurants or clubs to shopping for gifts and planning trips, concierge services are said to cover all your needs.
Now, they can even get your wedding viral on social media, with W Hotels in New York recently launching its dedicated Social Media Wedding Concierge. For a fee of US$3000 (AUD$3245), guests at the exclusive hotel chain get access to the following services as part of their wedding:
- Live tweeting of the ceremony and reception in Twitter,
- Instagram and Vine photos and videos,
- A unique wedding #hashtag,
- Set up and maintenance of a “Wedding Blog”
- Pinterest boards for both the wedding registry wish list and honeymoon,
- Facilitating social media posts and updates from guests; and
- A “wedding social media recap for the couple”.
W Hotels has said that it came up with the idea based on current social media trends.
“With social media as a growing, integral part of documenting the entire wedding experience, the hotels are now offering brides and grooms the opportunity to take advantage of this trend and put a spin on “Something Borrowed” by borrowing one of W’s social media experts to document their special day via social media,” the company says in a pitch email sent to Huffington Post tech editor Bianca Bosker.
“From live tweets and #hashtags to Vine videos and Instagram filters, W’s Social Media Wedding Concierge will document the “I Dos” and encourage guests to utilize a dedicated wedding hashtag for every one of their posts.”
The announcement of the Social Media Wedding Concierge quickly gained a lot of attention and media coverage, with most people questioning the need for this type of service.
But as W Hotel’s global social media strategist Alyssa Keifer told Fast Company, it was inspired by the behaviour and feedback of couples using the hotel’s other wedding services and could enhance the wedding industry as a result.
“To some, this may seem a bit over the top and we’re okay with that,” she says. “We’re sure couples balked at the idea of traditional wedding planners years ago and now you wouldn’t think of planning a wedding without one.”
Concierge Culture
Whether or not people agree with Keifer’s statements about the Social Media Wedding Concierge, she does bring up an important point that applies to all concierge services: they are not meant for everyone.
Traditionally concierge services had been offered as a way of providing customers or guests with more personalised services in environments where they may otherwise be overlooked, particularly at hotels and in the hospitality industry in general according to a report from Morris University in the USA.
“A concierge can provide a wide range of services for guests while playing a significant role on behalf of the hotel’s management,” the report explains.
“The service fits the needs of the guests by taking action or providing information to the guest.”
The study also notes that this services is particularly appealing for executives travelling for work as well as affluent travellers. So even the nature of a concierge can be associated with only certain types of people and, by extension, that means the services are often unique or within a certain “niche”.
In fact, there is now a widely held assumption that all concierges receive incredibly weird requests from guests.
“Any big-city traveler knows the hotel concierge can put “magician” on his resume because of all the wonderful tricks so easily pulled out of his hat in his daily performance of the impossible,” US author, speaker and consultant Judy Colbert writes on her blog.
In some cases it could be a matter or redecorating a hotel room for guests, or charting a private helicopter for guests, but could also include arranging actual breakfast at Tiffany’s in New York or storing an elk, which Brown Palace in Denver once arranged for actor Steven Segal.
The rise of the internet has also fuelled more outrageous requests, as guests gain more access to resources like maps, directions and restaurant waitlists.
“Concierges say the Internet has vastly changed the nature of their job,” a Forbes report on the industry explains.
“With so much information at people’s fingertips, guests no longer reach out to them for mundane things like directions or itineraries. Now they are much likely to come to concierges with requests that are much more magnanimous–or personal.”
Forbes also notes that some of the more “unique” requests have included shipping a tiger overseas, hunting down tarantulas for a guest to roast and eat, and on concierge even spent a week overseas getting to know someone’s pet before flying back with it (on the guest’s dollar).
It’s also worth noting these requests are just from hotel concierges – never mind the professionals placed in high-end shopping centres and department stores, or even the personalised concierge services that come with some premium credit cards. Who knows what stories they may have, locked away under confidentiality clauses?
But regardless of whether or not concierges can do anything asked of them, it is clear from some of these requests that hiring someone to set up social media services for a wedding is among the more mundane options available to hotel guests around the world.
The post Can Concierge Services Really Do Everything? appeared first on Quid.