Originally Posted by
miikka
For Finland they have their own staff employed by AMEX but the problem is that AMEX USA then doesn't want to deal with any requests from other countries (according to AMEX UK who clearly stated that they will always help members from other countries). The most logical way for customer would of course be that AMEX would act as a global company and AMEX Finland concierge could contact their colleagues in USA to get some help (or contacts).
So in my case AMEX Finland concierge would have to try to figure out the correct contact by themselves and as we are talking about Apple and USA then it is possible that they would be failing. I don't know yet whether I will try it or if I will just ask my friends to get me one from USA if there are unlocked phones available from Apple Store for example.
I have had some discussions about this with Amex representatives in Finland. I specifically asked them whether I could use US Concierge while travelling over there as a) Finnish concierge is generally not open during US business hours and b) the US folks have much better local knowledge.
According to Amex Finland, no joy: Amex USA would not help me. Amex really needs to work this out to provide a decent international service...
My half dozen experiences with the Finnish Plat concierge have varied between good and pathetic. They have done a good job in e.g. arranging restaurant bookings in Europe.
However, when I tried to get tickets to a sold-out theatre performance in Finland, the answer was "no can do" without even trying to do anything. They claimed that they only do tickets for shows that they have a direct quota for; they cannot or do not want to locate aftermarket tickets.
Another total blank came about when I requested tickets for (or even information about) high school football games in the NYC region. They claimed to have made a thorough search and ended up stating that no football was played at all during the weekend in question. It took me little less than one hour to unearth information about available games and secure tickets. A pretty obscure request, but the performance was still not stellar.
It seem they are pretty good with mainstream stuff, but for something off-the-wall, you are likely to be out of luck.
Cheers,
T.