The last two years have been very busy and required a lot more travel than normal for me and my family. I’ll typically book my own travel and call American Express when I have something more complicated than I can just book online. However American Express is a bit focused on their particular programs and partners.
They will take your frequent flyer numbers and hotel program numbers and use them when they book, but they won’t necessarily look at your situation as a whole and try to find the best place for you based on your status level.I started looking for other options that provide concierge/travel booking/executive assistant type services thinking that when we are spending a lot of time on the road, such a service might be able to pay for itself by focusing on leveraging our status in various programs to get us into upgraded accommodations. I looked at a few places and decided to try Red Butler. My goal was for them to have a complete view of everything about how my family travels and be able to make our hectic schedule a lot more pleasant by thinking through all the different options and finding the ones that would work best for us–especially when it came to getting hotels.
Right about the time I was getting setup with Red Butler, we got an apartment in Manhattan which meant I wasn’t needing to find a hotel room every week. Since travel was only part of what RedButler offered I decided to go ahead and try them out and see if they would be helpful in other areas as well. This review covers my experience so far.
How Red Butlers Works
Red Butler has plans with as few as 5 hours per month all the way up to plans with 75 hours per month. At the 15 hour and higher level, you are assigned a “Dedicated Account Manager” to handle your interactions with Red Butler, but your actual requests are handled from a pool of virtual assistants and travel planners. According to this page, the Dedicated Account Manager will learn your preferences, then take your requests and assign them to the best person for the job from the pool. This sounds good because it seems like you’d get the benefits of a dedicated assistant with the ability to scale up quickly and have multiple people working on various tasks if necessary. In actual practice, it doesn’t work this way though and the people from the pool simply select tasks that they think they are good at. Unfortunately, it means that each task somewhat starts from scratch as the person doing the work doesn’t really have any context about you. They have access to a list of your preferences, but that isn’t always a great replacement for actually knowing someone. You’ll see what I mean in some of the examples later.
Time is tracked in “points.” A point is basically 20 minutes. So at the 15-hour plan you have 45 points per month. If you run out of points in a particular month you can buy more.
Your requests are handled through a dashboard where you basically create a ticket or issue for what you want to be done. You can also call or text your Dedicated Account Manager and they will create a ticket for you. Early on my experience was that while you can call or text them directly, they kind of made it clear that they are doing you a favor and would prefer you use the web dashboard to type in requests. More recently that seems to have changed and the Dedicated Account Managers seem a lot more aligned with trying to help make the process work smoothly.
The dashboard shows you how many points you have left and also shows how many calls and emails have been made on your behalf. It shows you how many hours have been worked on your behalf under the label “Hours Saved.” The Productivity graph is supposed to show how much time Red Butler has saved you compared to the national average hours that employees waste each month.
It seems as if they are kind of repositioning themselves to be a perk that companies can offer to their employees. So you can basically give everyone access to a certain number of points per month that they can use to do things that will make their lives easier. For example, an employee could use it to set up a doctors appointment or deal with a problem with the cable company without needing to wait on hold. Unfortunately if their service switches to trying to handle a very large number of people with just a few requests each month, they become a bit less useful to someone wanting more personalized help.
Red Butler In Practice
So how does Red Butler work in practice? I think they have some great potential if you can get the right people working your task. The example they give on their website is that your task will be assigned to someone named Karen who they describe as:
Karen has been an executive assistant for over 8 years and is based out of New York, NY. As a vetted and trained RBA, Karen is ready to apply her professional experience and skill set to get hands-on, accelerating your productivity. A great all-around admin and graduate of NYU, Karen also has special expertise in online research, Excel and PowerPoint.
After using them for over a year and a half, I have tasks that go amazingly well–enough that they might have been done by someone who had experience as an executive assistant for 8 years. Most of the tasks are done adequately enough that they save me time. Occasionally we have some that take a lot more work or clarification than I think should be necessary. Overall though, my experience seemed to be getting better through 2016. Part of this is probably me learning more what types of things are a good fit for Red Butler and part of it is probably Red Butler learning better how to do what I need and improving their processes.
Beginning in 2017, Red Butler changed some of the staff and a large number of my tasks have started being done by new people. It was a bit rougher than I would have liked, but my account manager started taking a more proactive approach that seemed to be really helping–until my account manager left the company. Some of the new RBAs aren’t as familiar with how to look up the history of previous tasks. While this was inconvenient, it sounds like they have implemented some better training programs for new people and it seems to have helped.
With that background, I’ll finish this post by listing a number of tasks they have done for me along with the results
Soccer Team
I coached my son’s soccer team and used Red Butler to call the parents to remind them of games, snack schedules, practice, pictures, etc. Once I got the list of the team, I scanned it and emailed it with my original request to call and tell everyone the practice time. Once that was done I could simply send in a request that said something like, “Please confirm with the rec center that our game is at 10:30 Saturday and then call the team to remind them Friday afternoon.” Friday afternoon I’d get an email listing each parent and the status of whether RedButler had spoken with them or left a message. When a new kid joined the team, it was just a matter of emailing Red Butler and saying to include the new child/phone number on the call list going forward.
Dealing with Southwest Outage
We were scheduled to fly back to our home in Kansas from NYC for a weekend the day after Southwest had a big computer glitch. Between the 4 of us, we had 7 large pieces of luggage checked of stuff that needed to get back to our house in Kansas. Our plane was there on time, but unfortunately, the crew wasn’t and the flight was canceled. With thousands of flights canceled, there were huge lines at the airport and very long wait times on the…
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