How to Use Your Credit Card’s Concierge Service

…or how to get someone to do your bidding for free.

I love credit cards (see my post on using trip delay insurance). One perk of credit cards that I take advantage of frequently is their concierge services.

Any card with the Visa Signature logo comes with a free concierge service, as do Amex Platinum and Centurion cards, Mastercard World Elite cards, and Discover cards (I’m not quite as certain regarding Discover cards, but the Discover card that I have comes with a concierge service, and it’s just the basic no annual fee Discover More card).

For the most part, I’ve used the Visa Signature concierge to make restaurant reservations. Want a table at Gary Danko? Instead of calling exactly 2 months in advance yourself, just send a request to your concierge, and they’ll do the calling for you. Want a reservation at a restaurant in Paris but you don’t speak French? Have your concierge deal with it.

Concierges can also do things like make travel recommendations, get concert tickets, send gifts, etc. I once was looking for a place near work to get my pupillary distance measured in SF for free, and instead of calling up optometrists and shops myself, I sent the request to the concierge, and they emailed me back a list of places where I could get this done. This saved me at least half an hour of research.

Granted, the quality of concierges varies greatly. I’ve used the Visa Signature concierge to make pretty much all of the restaurant reservations for my upcoming trip to Europe, but in some cases, they told me that tables weren’t available because they requested them for the wrong dates (for April 2nd instead of February 4th because they forgot that Europeans put the day first) or because they didn’t know how to dial an international number correctly. But overall, I’ve been quite pleased with the service that I’ve received from Visa (less so with Discover and Amex).

Have you ever used your credit card’s concierge service? What things have they done for you?