Shame on me! It’s been almost two months since I wrote my last parking essay! So here's a short article for you on the topic of online parking reservations.
It starts with my vacation last week. I went camping for at the Pinery Provincial Park.
Why camping? As a guy constantly immersed in technology camping is a great opportunity to get away from the laptop, Internet, cell phone and IM. According to this research the typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction.
The Ontario Parks System is pretty good, but it’s very popular. Unfortunately you now have to reserve your campsite at 7:01am exactly 5 months in advance of your camping date if you want to get a good campsite in one of the more popular parks. That's when a site becomes available. And that’s exactly what I did this year - and it was still a close call… thirty minutes later most of the reserve-able sites were booked!
Did I ever mention that camping is just like parking? There are a fixed number of sites with a high demand curve. And if you don’t reserve ahead of time then you take what you can get, usually the least desirable space furthest from the beach.
How does the camping industry manage their demand? Recently they’ve raised prices (still well within reason for value received), they’ve also started charging cancellation fees and even cracking down on parkers – er, I mean campers – who make multi-week reservations but only show up for the weekend portions of them, leaving their sites empty during weekdays.
More interesting, perhaps, is the reservation system. When I travel (camping or otherwise) I make virtually all of my arrangements online: I book my plane tickets, reserve the hotel room, rent a car, and get my driving directions online.
But I’ve never reserved parking online.
And that’s strange because in the parking industry we generally agree that parking is a piece of a journey and not the final destination. All of the other elements of my journey can be pre-arranged online, but not parking.
Finding parking online is not a challenge. I most often turn to either MapQuest or Yahoo! Maps for driving directions and local maps. The Yahoo! site is particularly cool because they offer a SmartView feature to superimpose features like hotels, restaurants, grocery stores, ATMs, and even parking right on top of the map you’re viewing.
This sample map of downtown Indianapolis shows nineteen parking lots. But I can’t reserve parking at any of these locations.
In fact, it’s no easy task to find any place where you can reserve parking online.
According to a Google search for online parking reservation there are only a few dozen sites offering online parking reservations, and most of these are airports.
The Park’n Fly Network has a system akin to a hotel reservation. And the ParkingAccess.com site helps you shop and compare parking at different locations around an airport.
But what about when I’m driving around in a foreign city? I could find only two web sites: Icon Parking gets you a space in Manhattan, while ClickAndPark.com gets you a space at your parking event. Notably I can’t vouch for either of these sites. Looking through the ClickAndPark.com site I tried 15 or so combinations of dates and locations, and I couldn’t find a single event listed.
There’s definitely an opportunity here for brand-building from a large parking operator to connect the online parking map with online reservations.
And when that day comes I’ll rejoice. And then I’ll start to ask for two more things:
- Before I arrive at the airport give me the ability to print my parking pass at home so that I hold a reservation well in advance of my arrival. (The airlines already offer this with a home-printed boarding pass; parking can’t be that much more difficult!)
- While I’m traveling provide me with the ability to see real-time parking availability at each of these locations, along with shop-and-compare pricing.
We obviously still have quite a way to go before we realize this vision. Nevertheless I’m convinced that it’s coming. The travel industry has been turned upside-down by cheaper, more convenient self-service over the Internet.
And I hope that parking won’t be far behind.
Online parking reservations exist. Try it out at www.gottapark.com
Posted by: John | July 03, 2009 at 02:00 AM
don't suffer that much! the real solution is to come by a taxi
Posted by: david tayeh | May 07, 2009 at 01:17 PM
Great article, any more info on anyone following up on this excellent idea?
Posted by: Scott Morgan | December 08, 2005 at 04:30 PM