The word bespoke is currently doing far too much work in luxury marketing. It describes hand-stitched shoes, ski lessons, paint colours, vegetable boxes and AI assistants. Inside our industry it has lost most of its specific meaning. So this essay is partly a reclamation. What does bespoke actually require of a pricing model — and what does it rule out?
Three pricing shapes you will encounter
Most concierge services are priced in one of three ways, and the shape tells you almost everything you need to know about the service behind it.
Hourly billing
A clock starts when you call. This is the model of a luxury services consultancy borrowing the law-firm playbook. It is honest and predictable. It is also subtly hostile to the client: every minute of friction costs them money, so they push back on the small frictions that produce the largest insights. We do not work this way.
Per-mission pricing
A flat fee per arranged event — a yacht charter, a private aviation trip, an estate setup. This works for transactional services and is a reasonable model for a charter broker. But it makes the concierge a counterparty to every line item rather than a counterpart to the principal. You can feel the misalignment in the recommendations.
Annual retainer
A standing fee for ongoing availability, with discrete projects priced separately and transparently. This is the only model that lets a concierge act as a fiduciary partner — because the incentive is to keep the relationship across years, not to extract revenue from a single mission.
The retainer is the relationship
When a family office puts a serious concierge on retainer, it is buying three things that an hourly model cannot offer at any price:
- Standing context. We know your residences, your aviation patterns, your travel taboos, your staffing structure. We do not relearn this every January.
- Anticipation. Because we are not billing by the minute, we volunteer the work nobody asked for — confirming a passport six weeks before expiry, pre-clearing an overflight permit for a destination you mentioned in passing, building a redundancy plan for a charter you will not need until autumn.
- Discretion under cost-pressure. No-one billing hourly turns down a billable call. A retained concierge can be the one to say no, that is a bad idea, here is the better one without losing the engagement.
Where the retainer comes from
We are sometimes asked how we set the retainer. The honest answer is: by measuring the team. A serious concierge does not sell a calendar — it sells the standing readiness of named people. The retainer is the cost of those people being available to you, having read the brief, having internalised the household, and having pre-cleared the partners we will need to reach in an emergency.
The number is not arbitrary, but it is also not a public list. It varies between families with three properties on two continents and families with twelve properties on five. We share the structure in a private conversation; we share the number after a discovery call.
What we never do
- We do not take undisclosed commissions from partners.
- We do not bundle in a charter, a hotel rate or a watchmaker's referral as a profit centre.
- We do not contractually bind a family to a multi-year minimum.
- We do not publicise the relationship.
- We do not bill by the minute.
These five lines are the pricing model, more than any number.
The implicit promise
A retainer is a promise to be there during the year you don't need much. The temptation to extract more value during the quiet quarters is the test of whether a concierge understands what they have agreed to. The right answer is to be quietly useful, to compose the next year's logistics in advance, and to be available the day the family suddenly does need a lot — without a new conversation about scope.
That conversation, when it never has to happen, is bespoke.
Discuss a retainer in confidence: private contact.