A mystery to many but a friend to all, the hotel concierge is a traveler's most overlooked ally. Christian L. Wright reports on these ultimate insiders and how to put them to work for you

The haze has lifted to reveal a sparkling Saturday morning in Los Angeles, where concierge James Little presides over the lobby of the Peninsula Beverly Hills from behind a spindly–legged antique desk. So focused is he on the needs of longtime guest Mr. J that he doesn't even notice Paris Hilton tottering by in a short yellow frock, trailed by a young Latino toting her Tod's handbag. Mr. J has come in from Texas, and he's in the mood to tool around town on the custom–detailed Indian motorcycle that he keeps in the hotel's garage. Little runs the bike's engine every week, but today it won't start, so he's on the phone with a mechanic he knows who specializes in such things. Between discussing batteries and trip switches, he tucks the receiver under his chin to bid a "Morning, Mr. Carville" to the squinty bald politico passing by his desk.

And here comes Mr. J now, a tall man in pressed denim and a leather jacket. Little glides across the lobby to inform him of the situation and to offer a stopgap solution: His own BMW motorcycle is parked next to Mr. J's Indian in the garage. "You're welcome to take it for a spin," he says. Later in the morning, Little kneels on the floor of the hotel's garage in his pristine navy blue suit and fiddles with some wires behind the rear wheel of Mr. J's motorcycle, trying to get it to start. Alas, no joy. After work, Little will deliver the bike to the mechanic to fix and then ride it back to the hotel in time for Mr. J to take it out on a brilliant Sunday cruise.

THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS
Almost any good hotel concierge can score a hard–to–get ticket or wrangle a table at the hottest restaurant in town, but for a top concierge, even the art of motorcycle maintenance is all in a day's work. He (or, increasingly in the United States, she) is asked to do everything from fetching a matchbook to hiring a private jet; for this, he can earn anywhere from $50,000 to well into six figures, including tips.

The word concierge is derived from the Latin conservus, or "fellow slave," and the profession's roots can be traced to the trusted servants who looked after nobility and kept the keys to the castle in the Middle Ages. By the 1800s, every building of any significance in Western Europe (royal, municipal, residential) had a concierge, who was like the building superintendent of today. The hotel concierge, as we know him, wasn't born until the dawn of the twentieth century, when improvements in train travel brought touring into vogue. It was then that guests at, say, a luxury hotel in Geneva began to ask the concierge for advice on getting to the Alps; and so the omniscient presence behind the lobby desk became a fixture in fancy European hotels.

The services a concierge could provide multiplied exponentially in 1929, when Ferdinand Gillet, the head concierge at the Hotel Scribe in Paris, founded Les Clefs d'Or, an association of concierges based on a network of "service through friendship." Suddenly, a concierge in the lobby of a hotel in Rome could call upon his counterpart in Berlin to find out the best spot for Wiener schnitzel for a guest who would be arriving there in a few days.