Just getting out of bed every day is a feat unto itself, let alone planning vacations, events, occasions, and any spontaneous whims. Enter Luiz Hoinkis and Justin Keeperman, concierges extraordinaire and founders of the luxury WGY Lifestyle management firm. WGY offers its members access to some of the most popular and exclusive events and accommodations. And with Art Basel right around the corner, and attendees scrambling to secure hotel rooms and party invites, members can lay back and let their managers do the work. From travel to leisure to daily routine tasks, they’ve got you covered. Both Hoinkis and Keeperman have accumulated the collective industry contacts to make even the most exclusive guest lists accessible. Each membership entails a personalized luxury experience, 24-hour access to a lifestyle manager, and the ability to do what you want, when you want it. Whether it be a hotel room, restaurant reservations, event tickets, flight upgrades, or a spontaneous helicopter ride to a David Guetta concert, you can expect Luiz and Justin to go the extra mile.
RCR: So how do you give clients the red carpet experience?
JK: We have a membership program and we also have an a la carte service. Let’s say a client wants to go to the Oscars, let’s say they want to go to the Vanity Fair party. We have access to everything and we have vendors that have access to everything!
RCR: So what are the prices for membership?
JK: Memberships vary from $8,000 to $12,000 a year. A big portion of our company is travel. A lot of our clients range from eccentric Silicon Valley executives to the top Wall Street executive.We even have some actors and actresses and people in film. And really the thing that is the common ground for everyone is that they don’t have enough time to plan their own lifestyles. We have contracts with all the major hotel groups around the world. We have contacts with all the international airlines. When one of our members arrives at the airport, there’s a staff member from the airlines waiting at the curb, they walk them in, through security, onto a golf cart, to the gate. So it’s really like a VIP kind of service. Another big portion of our industry is events and getting last-minute reservations and getting people access for instance, Art Basel. We have a complete schedule of literally everything that’s going on and we give our clients priority to what they want to go to, and we get them on guest lists.
RCR: What are the hot parties at Art Basel this year?
JK: I would say Untitled party is always really, really cool. I’m really excited this year for the Cartier party at the W. The Scope VH1 party is always really fun. And with the Thompson Hotel opening, they are having a ton of great events going on.
RCR: Why should somebody be a WGY client?
JK: I think that we have proven ourselves to be a leader in the luxury market. I think that the relationships that we’ve developed are benefits that money can’t buy. Thanks to our connections and insider knowledge, our members are always the first to know the latest news when it comes to anything and everything based on their client profile. I think that we excel at freeing up precious time to make our clients’ days the most efficient they can be so they can really enjoy their life to the fullest.
I think that we bridge the gap between global and local. We provide a personal concierge and lifestyle management 24 hours a day. For our clients, we have an 800 number that they can call anywhere in the world and 24 hours a day there’s always someone to pick up and handle requests for our clients.
RCR: What is the craziest request that you’ve ever had?
JK: We were hosting a group for for New Years. It was actually in Brazil and it was a crazy, crazy New Years. They rented out a huge, huge villa. And all of a sudden they decided that they wanted to wake up on New Years Day with a monkey—a live monkey in their villa! So we had, like, three hours, because it was already really late, and we found them a monkey and we brought a monkey to their villa and that was a crazy, funny request. We’ve landed helicopters on the stage next to David Guetta when he was performing.
RCR: Was the helicopter for David?
JK: No. It was for a client that was going to see David, and it landed right next to the stage, while he was performing! It was a total last minute thing.
RCR: So is there a celebrity that you would love to work with? And if so, what would you want to do for them?
JK: I’d love to work with someone like Madonna. I think she’s just so amazing and I think she’d be a lot of fun to work with. And I think that she’s a really special icon. And I think that she’d be tough, but we really like challenge as well.
RCR: What does the future look like for your company?
JK: Phase 3.0 is being released the second week of December, right after Art Basel. And we are going to be having a launch party at the SLS in Miami to celebrate! It’s going to be a lot more interactive where clients can see different destinations and itineraries. They can really use the website hands-on. Right now, we have a live chat feed feature and we have social, i.e. Facebook and Twitter. And for 2015, we have plans to open up another office in Rio de Janeiro, so we’re really looking forward to that as well. We already have an office in San Paolo, but a lot of our clients are from Brazil, which is such a booming market here in the US, so we’re really excited about that project as well.
Awesome! Art Basel sounds like so much fun