Concierge Desk
"Making your trip through life a little easier!"

Origins of Concierge Desk Consulting

Concierge Desk's roots can be traced back to 1989 when founder
Lance Frank became manager of the Radio Shack store in the
Palm Springs Mall.

The Palm Springs economy is heavily dependent on the  hospitality
industry.  Frank would get daily calls from  desperate hotel concierges
with urgent requests for items  required by visitors. Their guest's trip
would almost certainly be ruined along with their careers if they could
not find this  battery or that for their camera or cordless phone or
some exotic adapter for a foreign travel power converter .

Unfortunately, there were hundreds of these products in the Radio
Shack catalog. It was almost impossible for Frank and his staff to figure
out  exactly which one the concierge was describing. This was the early
days of the Internet.  Frank remembers longing to be able to direct them
to a web site where the concierge could visually identify the item they were
looking for. But in the early 90's, Radio Shack like most corporations, had
no web site to direct them to. Even if they did, very few hotels had Internet
access  and those that did were on dial up modems with snail like connect
speeds ...far to slow to handle multiple photographs of countless batteries
and foreign travel adapters.

It would be almost ten years before the commercial internet begin to
evolve. In 1997 Frank started his first of many web sites. One of these
was HotelPros.com which was intended to provide local concierges
with a one stop directory of local services to make their guest's stay
more enjoyable. But when a customer commented that  "HotelPros"
sounded like a hooker service, Frank decided to change the name to
ConciergeDesk.com.

Broadband would not arrive in the area for another five years and local
businesses were slow to accept it when it did. As such, Frank found little
demand for his service. He began thinking of ways to use the new medium
in ways which did not require heavy use of graphics. He began to write
plain text articles on his experiences as a Radio Shack store manager in the
Palm Springs area. From these articles evolved Frank's philosophy which
stressed the interdependency of all businesses in a heavily tourism
dependent economy. These articles  ultimately resulted in the Concierge
Desk Customer Service Improvement Program which stresses the importance
of all members of a community working together to make a visitor's trip more
enjoyable. Most importantly, it puts responsibility on the shoulders of
management to achieve this goal in a positive manner which does not come
across as forced or coerced, but rather as a genuine concern of their staff for
their guest's well being.