Using American Express Platinum concierge for travel guides, tips, and reservations for Tokyo, Japan

Introduction

My wife and I have an agreement in place where I would do all the points collecting and booking, and it’s her job to figure out what to do when we get to said city.  I give her dates and even have a nice template for her to fill out, so it’s easy stuff.  The problem is she has this problem called ‘information overload,’ and quite frankly, it drives ME NUTS.  For instance, if I ask her, “Do you want Chinese or Mexican tonight?” she can easily answer that.  However, if I ask her, “What do you want to eat tonight?”  Good luck trying to get an answer.  And this is the problem when she researches things to do in a new city.  She’ll start out with a simple Google search and within 10-15 minutes, she gives up because there are just too many options.  If anyone knows how to cure this, please let me know.

Amex Platinum Concierge to the rescue

I’ve only used the AMEX Plat concierge line to book me restaurant reservations.  I once asked them to try to get me Taylor Swift tickets, but they failed miserably, so I just stuck to restaurant reservations.  Then one day, while chatting with Chasing the Points, he told me he used them to help him figure out what to see/do on his future trip.  And since I was heading to Sydney, Queenstown, Aukland, and Tokyo next month, I figured I’ll give it a shot.

I called them up and the nice rep Tracey took my call.  I told him I was going to X,Y, and Z and wanted travel guides for those places.  I then asked her for restaurant recommendations as well.  She asked me what type of restaurants I wanted.  I told her I wanted good and local (which I’m sure is what 99% of people say.)  I did tell her I wanted to try a Michelin star restaurant in Sydney, but not in New Zealand since I knew there weren’t any Michelin star places in NZ.  This at least helped her narrow her search.  I also told her I wanted a reservation at Jiro’s in Tokyo (yes, THE Jiro’s.)  She told me that was rsvp would be really hard, and the best way would be to have the hotel call in the rsvp for me.  I hadn’t booked the Park Hyatt Tokyo yet, so I told her I’d get back to her on that.  I made this call on a Tuesday night, and she asked if she could send the results by Saturday morning since she had to look up 3 different locations.  My trip was a month away so it wasn’t a problem.

I thought it was odd that it would take them 3 days to send out generic guides, but on Friday, I got an email from her with 3 separate travel guides as well as restaurant recommendations in the body of the email.  I then replied back to the email with my Park Hyatt reservation number, and later in the day, she told me she had contacted the hotel, and they would make the rsvp for me.  However, since Jiro only opens up his rsvp book a month in advance, I wouldn’t know for another week or two.  The cool thing is that when you reply to the email, although it goes to a generic email address, it does route back to the same rep.  This way, you don’t know to deal with someone new, which is awesome.  

Anyway, if you’re interested in the Tokyo travel guide, here it is.  I haven’t read through the entire thing yet, but it looks very thorough.  I haven’t been there before, so don’t know about the quality of the guide.  The odd thing is that CtP sent me his travel guide for the city he’s going to, and while there is similar information, the format is a bit different.  This either means they changed their format recently, or every AMEX concierge comes up with their own travel guide.  I’m not sure how I feel about that; while I like the personal touch of this, I think for city travel guides, you should just use a template and sorta cut and paste like “Oh you don’t like the outdoors, so I’ll delete that from the template.”  Either way, I highly recommend you take advantage of this perk with the AMEX Platinum cards.