Parking is a multi-billion dollar industry that is visibly lagging behind other industries in terms of technology — it’s still extremely common to see parking booth attendants handling individual transactions in parking facilities around the world.
Most of parking garage management is also done manually — from monitoring facilities to ensure that there is availability for permit parkers to analyzing how to increase revenue of a facility.
Some managers are upping their game.
Christina Murray, Operations Manager at Premier Parking oversees 28 parking assets in Austin, TX. Christina has realized that pulling reports from outdated machines takes hours, and has opted to automate this process. Instead, she connects this data via Smarking and visualizes capacity and utilization remotely; she is immediately able to evaluate a garage or lots ability to fulfill reserved space requests.
Ensuring Contract Availability Remotely
To ensure parking space availability for monthly permit holders, garage managers like Murray often have turn around daily parkers during peak periods. Many facilities operate by manually monitoring and counting available spaces. However, with real-time occupancy data, Premier Parking is able to see when garages are filling up and how many spaces are available in real-time.
Automated Reporting
Operators spend a huge amount of their resources downloading data from multiple PARCS systems and preparing them in a clear and presentable format. Smarking reinvents how Christina Murray at Premier parking completes this process. By integrating all transaction and revenue data into its analysis platform, Smarking has saved Murray and her team approximately 780/hours/year of this monotonous task.
“It used to take 3 hrs/day to run the reports from our PARCS and convert them into graphs, as our clients are really interested in how occupancy and price per ticket change day to day.
Now I can get them immediately through Smarking. In addition to meeting my client’s request, I can also make decisions on staffing and pricing on an event day, based on the traffic flow of previous event days provided in Smarking.”
- Christina Murray Senior Account Manager, Austin, TX
Understanding Occupancy Trends
For special events, valet companies will often sign contracts with parking garage managers to reserve a certain number of spaces. That manager must then ensures that there will be enough availability during the requested period. With an analytics dashboard, Christina Murray was able to determine if 50 requested spaces would be available on a Friday in April. She was then able to monitor the impact of the valet vehicles in real- time.
“I had a valet operator approach me regarding needing to use up to 50 spaces on Fridays only from 11am-3:30pm and wanted to know if any of my facilities could house that. Using Smarking, I was able to nail down the time period on Fridays that he needed and get our average occupancy right away. I was able to nail down the deal in less than 10 minutes.”
- Christina Murray Senior Account Manager, Austin, TX
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