Athena Avis 

I found Athena to be severely oversold relative to what is actually delivered.

Athena markets itself as providing elite, proactive executive support. In practice, the service was highly process-driven and struggled with basic accuracy, judgment, and follow-through even on straightforward administrative tasks. Deliverables routinely required rework, arrived late, or contained errors that should have been caught with minimal quality control.

Importantly, these issues persisted even after swapping executive assistants, which indicates this is not a one-off talent problem but a systemic issue with screening, training, and matching. The experience did not improve with intervention.

The core problem is the gap between positioning and reality. This is not high-leverage support. It is task execution that still requires close oversight, which largely defeats the purpose of hiring an executive assistant in the first place.

This service may be adequate for very simple, repetitive workflows or users new to delegation. For senior professionals expecting baseline competence, ownership, and reliability consistent with how Athena markets itself, I would strongly caution setting expectations accordingly.

This is my experience of onboarding to @athenago (athena.com), the executive assistant platform:

1. I asked "Do you have clients in Singapore or HK?" via email. No reply to that question from the sales.
2. I'm supposed to book onboarding call via calendly. The earliest available slot was 12 midnight Or I could choose 6 am, or anything in between. If onboarding looks like this, what does the rest of the service look like for APAC customers?
3. While I was trying to give Athena my money, their portal kept crashing. I’m an engineer, so of course I did the whole ceremony: cache, cookies, local storage, incognito, different browser. Still broken. It was choking on a concatenated Calendly URL. Screenshots attached.
4. Support replied my email saying "There's 5 pm slot". There wasn’t. I checked all day every day selectable on that Calendly page. Eventually the call was booked manually, via email exchanges, not using Calendly.
5. Now I'm charged US$2833 already on my card. But I was asking is this rate for executive assistant alone, or bundled EA + coaching. And what is the rate difference? I did not get a answer for the rate difference.
6. Moving on, I'm supposed to do a DQ (delegation quotient) call. I scheduled, wait at my desk for the meeting at the hour sharp. But the person is late for more than 10 minutes (for a 50 minutes call).

It's utterly disappointing and unacceptable.

Unprofessional. CV collectors. Don't respect European law.

If you want to hire a cheap 3rd world laborer from Philippines who does basic work for 3000$/mo, double the amount you’d pay for a skilled 9-5 local worker with native English skills and expertise in the field you’re working in, then you’re throwing money out the drain.