Concierge glossary: the terms and what they actually mean

A retainer is a recurring fee that buys availability, whether or not requests are made. A membership is a retainer sold annually, usually with tiers. Pay-per-request means no standing fee and no held capacity. A jet card is the same idea applied to flying hours.

The distinction that matters across all of them is whether anything is being held for you between requests. That single question separates the models more reliably than any of their names does.

A concierge acts outside your routines, dealing with third parties on your behalf. A personal assistant acts inside them, under your direction. A lifestyle manager holds standing responsibility for defined areas and is expected to act unasked. A house manager does the same for a property and its staff.

Firms use these interchangeably. The contract does not, and the contract is what determines who is responsible when something is missed.

Hospitality means a published tier at a ticketed event: seating, catering, separate entry, sometimes parking. An invitation means a place on a list controlled by someone else and has no price. Allocation describes goods released to selected buyers rather than sold openly.

All three are routinely described as VIP, which is why the word carries almost no information on its own. Ask which of the three is meant and the answer becomes checkable.

A joining fee is one-off and separate from the annual figure, and quoted totals frequently omit it. Pass-through means a cost billed at what the provider paid; a margin means it was not. Contingent describes a fee payable only on success, and is rare on anything genuinely difficult.

Landed cost, in procurement, means the price including duty, tax and shipping. The gap between the purchase price and the landed cost is where most unwelcome surprises in that category live.

Bespoke should mean a scope written for you. It frequently means no scope was written at all, which is the opposite. Global reach usually means someone will travel, which is a real service but not local presence. Unlimited requests are generally bounded by a fair-use clause several pages further in.

None of these are dishonest by themselves.

They simply describe intentions rather than obligations, and the difference only appears when something goes wrong.

Most industries settle on shared terms because buyers compare on them. This one has not, and the reason is structural: with almost no published pricing, the words are doing the work that a price list would do elsewhere. A term that sounds like a specification is often a positioning statement, and the same word can describe two products that differ by an order of magnitude in cost.

The practical defence is to convert every term into a question about mechanics. Not what is included in the tier, but who does the work and what happens when they are unavailable. Not whether access is offered, but whether a published price list exists for the thing being accessed. Terms survive that translation or they do not, and the ones that do not are the ones worth pressing on.

The entries here describe how each term is used in practice rather than how it might be defined. Where usage is genuinely inconsistent between firms, the entry says so instead of picking a winner.

Four terms decide most of what an arrangement actually is. Whether the provider works on request or on standing authority determines how much has to be asked each time. Whether a fee is a retainer or a membership determines whether unused capacity carries forward. Whether a cost is passed through or marked up determines what the headline price means. And whether a market is covered directly or through a partner determines who answers at night.

None of those four is usually the term a firm leads with, and all four are answerable in a sentence. Asking them early is the cheapest research available in this category.