Yeah, as I said in a post above, it appears that Aspire is still serving SOME concierge calls, and when I called a few days ago it was clearly picked up by an Aspire agent. However, the other time I called it was serviced by an outsourced agent who just asked me a bunch of cookie cutter questions and provided me with "recommendations" which were also quite uninspiring.

My guess is, based on the questions I asked the agent, Amex hasn't gotten rid of Aspire but has been supplementing them with some outsourced company with agents in India. Who knows if this is a temporary stopgap or a test run for a permanent shift. From data points in another topic it does appear they may have completely eliminated the Platinum Travel Service agents for US customers in favor of agents who do not appear to be qualified travel agents (unlike the old Platinum Travel Service).

Meanwhile, I was in conversation with Velocity Black about potentially signing up for their service. It's several thousand dollars, and right at the moment we don't want to shell out for that but in the summer or fall I was thinking of signing up. However, I was in conversation with someone from the service and then suddenly he ghosted me - who knows why. Perhaps I'm not good enough to sign up for their service? I'm not a HNWI but I do have sufficiently high income and assets that I was thinking about signing up anyway, but perhaps they don't want mere upper middle class members? Who knows. First world problems.