Concierge services in Boston: the firms here and their lead times

Every fixture tracked here falls in April, which makes Boston a single-season market: one window governs availability and the rest of the calendar is open. The longest booking lead time tracked here is 26 weeks; the shortest is 16.

Rates do not vary by city. The four engagement models are priced per firm and per tier, so what changes in Boston is not the cost of an arrangement but how far ahead it has to be arranged, and at up to 26 weeks, that is far enough that the decision to retain someone has to come first.

The binding date here is Boston Marathon, which runs in third Monday of April and wants 16-26 weeks of notice. Count 16-26 weeks back from Boston Marathon and anything depending on that week has to be placed around October. Later than October and the choice narrows to whatever nobody else took.

That one date sets the shape of the whole year here.

Every fixture tracked in Boston is the same kind of event: sport (Boston Marathon). One kind of demand makes the year easy to read and leaves nothing to switch to when Boston Marathon tightens at once. There is no second front to fall back on: the same venues and the same operators are stretched at the same time every year.

The single fixture tracked here carries a confirmed date and a named venue, Boston Marathon,, each sourced at the foot of this page. All of them sit at Hopkinton to Boylston Street, so what runs out in Boston is that building's capacity and the few streets around it, on the one date.

2 firms in this index publish a Boston presence: Knightsbridge Circle, John Paul. They do not compete directly. individual membership and b2b and bank distributed are different products bought by different people, and comparing their headline figures is the most common error at this stage.

1 of them carries at least one reported fee figure, though in most cases it was reported by a third party and never published by the firm. Where sources disagree, both numbers are kept and neither is averaged away.

One further point follows from Boston having a single fixture on the list. Boston Marathon sits in third Monday of April, and the other eleven months carry nothing this index tracks. Eleven idle months of retainer to hold one predictable week in third Monday of April is a lot of money for a date that is published years ahead, and a per-request arrangement covers the same week for a fraction of it.

Supply and timing interact here. With fixtures needing up to 26 weeks of notice and a small number of firms publishing locally, the binding constraint in Boston is capacity during the peak, not choice of provider.

Against the 55 markets tracked here, Boston asks for more notice than most: its longest lead time of 26 weeks is above the index median of 16, which places it 5th for advance notice. A market that asks for this much notice rewards being already engaged, because the useful work happens months before anyone feels urgency.

Its concentration is the more useful thing to plan around, and Boston is the extreme case: every fixture tracked here sits in April. Against the 67% of markets whose whole calendar fits inside a four-month span, Boston asks one question and no others: is April covered.