In partnership with
Many years ago, back when I still ran my luxury concierge company, a client called one of our lifestyle assistants with an unusual condition.
He wanted a month in Catalunya.
He said he would confirm the trip only if we secured him a table at El Bulli.
I remember thinking: who travels like that? Who lets one dinner reservation decide whether a month-long trip happens at all?
He built an entire trip around one guarantee.
Everything else in the itinerary was secondary to that.
Back then it looked eccentric.
Today it's closer to a business model.
There's now a market for what you quietly absorb
By 2024, Appointment Trader, a platform where people list hard-to-get restaurant reservations and buyers bid on them, said it had sold $5.7 million in reservations over the previous year.
During Super Bowl weekend in New Orleans, one reservation at Antoine's went for $2,138.
A Brown University student named Alex Eisler built a side business booking reservations under fake names and reselling them. He told The New Yorker he cleared $70,000 doing it in a single year.
New York has since banned third-party platforms from selling reservations without the restaurant's written permission.
That client wasn't being difficult. He was early.
The instinct that made him build an entire trip around one reservation is the same instinct now worth real money to strangers with a laptop and a fake phone number.
A scalper sells possession of a reservation. You sell the judgment, the relationships, the persistence, and the accountability it takes to make the evening happen properly.
Scarcity has acquired a visible price.
Advisors have been absorbing the work of overcoming that scarcity inside fees that often fail to acknowledge it.
Worth sitting with this week:
Whether hard-to-get access lives inside your paid advisor work, or gets absorbed as an invisible courtesy nobody prices separately.
You Already Have a Take on What AI Does Next
OpenAI or Anthropic? Which model leads the next benchmark? Which company ships the next major breakthrough?
If you follow AI closely, you already have opinions on where the industry is headed. Kalshi lets you trade on real-world AI and technology events, with markets that move as models launch, benchmarks drop, and announcements happen.
The people who follow this space most closely often see the story developing before everyone else. Put that knowledge to work and trade what you think happens next.
Bonus credit varies from $15 to $500. Terms apply.
📩 Share this email with your colleagues and invite them to join our expanding community of luxury travel professionals.
📫 If you received The Expert’s Guild Weekly from a friend and would like to subscribe, please do so here:
