Enhancing Customer Experience in Mall Parking

Brett Mathews: I would like to add about a personal experience at a 7000 bay car park in Westfield, Statford, London which turns over 2-3 times a day. They have chip coin technology and they really regret the day they introduced this instead of parking tickets. It is not at all a sensible solution, especially for such high volume environments.

Wilfred Menezes: Also I would like to add a point here, as Nimish said it was popular during 90’s. Those days people were looking for recurring devices, to reuse things. This has both plus and minus points. A plus is that you can re-use it and the minus is, in case if there is a breakdown you have no written information on the token, it’s all written inside. There are also hygienic reasons, because it has been used by a large number of people, so it also transfers some kind of skin diseases. So in Europe their usage is prohibited to a large extent. There are now parking
tickets which have replaced them. Besides that we are also talking about some value cards. As Benu said in value
cards you have to load your money for loyalty programs. Every time you use it, it takes money out from the card. The next one is the RFID or different types of proximity cards which you could use for the members. So these are the options that you have with the systems from the technology point of view.

Q. We talked about dynamic pricing where prices go up during weekends. But there are times when a lot of capacity is kind of going underutilised, such as during off peak times. Obviously parking is a perishable inventory. I was wondering whether there any solutions worked out overseas, wherein you can utilize this idle capacity a lot better and also in effect probably reduce the price on the other side also in some ways? 

Brett Mathews: Yes, we have done that successfully. We have found out from the online bookings that we can address this very rapidly. We can communicate with our customers because now we know who they are and we can certainly offer them tariffs that we can change within an hour or by the day to take care of the low usage times. This can be seasonal. Or during certain times of the day or for some days of the week, the rates can be heavily discounted. In Sydney, we are offering on weekend evenings five dollars a day which is probably one fifth or one-fourth of the normal tariff.

Benu Sehgal: I really agree that no space, commercial space should be underutilized. I am taking a few initiatives on this at the DLF mall. Thereis basement 1 which was fully parked every week days but basement 2 and 3 were underutilized all the time. We have two hospitals close by, so what we have done is we have sold the parking to the doctors who would come from Monday to Friday. We have a deal with them so that every brick generates revenue in the mall. We have not only helped remove congestion but we have also developed a very good relationship with the hospital.

Abhishek Bansal: We have started go-carting in our parking area from Monday to Friday.