Should a property use its existing providers or build a new concierge network?

The instinct to protect long-standing suppliers is usually correct. A driver who has been collecting your guests for six years knows the road, the airport, the property gate code and the fact that the family in villa two always travels with a folding pushchair. That is real operational knowledge and it cannot be procured.

The instinct becomes expensive when it is applied to categories that were never chosen — only inherited.

Three kinds of existing supplier

Most properties have all three, and treat them identically. They should not.

The third category is where risk concentrates, because an operator used once in an emergency quietly becomes the default the next time the same request arrives.

A six-point supplier audit

These questions can be answered in an afternoon and are worth more than any procurement exercise.

1. 01Response time: how long do they take to reply on a Friday evening in high season, not on a Tuesday morning in April?
2. 02Licensing and insurance: current, and correct for the exact activity — a boat licensed for one use is not licensed for another
3. 03Capacity: what happens when they are already booked, and do they tell you or simply go quiet?
4. 04Failure behaviour: how did they handle the last cancellation, delay or complaint? This predicts more than anything else
5. 05Commercial terms: are they defined and stable, or renegotiated each time?
6. 06Substitutability: if they disappeared tomorrow, how long would it take to replace them?

Point four is the one that matters most and the one nobody checks in advance. Every supplier performs well when the day goes to plan.

Where the gaps almost always are

Across properties, the pattern is consistent. Transfers and cleaning are covered. Restaurants are covered informally. The recurring gaps sit in the categories that require verification effort disproportionate to how often they are requested:

• Childcare — because proper vetting is genuinely demanding and the consequences of getting it wrong are severe
• Private chefs — because judging a chef requires eating the food, more than once
• Water activities — because licensing, insurance and safety verification take real effort
• Wellness therapists — because qualification and insurance are rarely checked, only assumed
• Anything needed at short notice on a Sunday

These are also the categories with the highest value per booking, which is why the gap is expensive rather than merely inconvenient.

The case for a second option in every category

Single-supplier categories are a structural fragility, not a preference. When your only chef is unavailable, the request does not move to a colleague — it disappears, and the guest arranges something themselves or does without.

A second verified option per category is not disloyalty to the first. Suppliers understand seasonality and capacity better than anyone; what damages a relationship is unpredictable volume, not the existence of an alternative.

A sensible sequence

1. 01Keep every supplier that is chosen and proven. Do not disturb what works
2. 02Audit the inherited ones against the six points. Some will graduate; some will not
3. 03Close the two or three categories where you have nobody, before adding depth elsewhere
4. 04Add a second option in whichever category your guests request most often
5. 05Review after one season using the record of what was actually sold and what failed

Building an entire network from scratch is rarely the right answer, and replacing nothing is rarely the right answer either. Almost every property sits between the two: a solid core worth protecting, two or three real gaps, and one supplier everybody has quietly stopped trusting.