With the passing of Thanksgiving 2018, the nation has entered the busiest time of year for shopping and travel. More than half of the American population—165 million people—hit stores both online and retail from Black Friday to Cyber Monday. Unquestionably, these stats make up a large portion of this season’s holiday shopping, however reports show that consumers still have more than half of their holiday shopping to finalize before major holidays hit, according to the National Retail Federation’s recent report.
Whether the American public purchases online or in-store, this holiday shopping surge will directly affect the nation’s parking facilities and roadways. In anticipation for the spending season, parking facilities have jumped on the opportunity to provide promotions for customers.
Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport had an early Black Friday sale for drivers planning to fly. Nicknamed Orange Wednesday to reflect their branding, airport managers offered 75% discounts for consumers who booked their parking on the day before Thanksgiving.
Entire municipalities followed suit in their own fashion. Town leaders in places like Burlington, Vermont offered discount codes for drivers who prepaid for street parking using the Parkmobile application. Even more generous, one of the city’s parking garage owners allowed customers four hours of free parking at one downtown location, according to the Burlington Free Press.
Additionally, online parking applications like SpotHero, got in on the action as well. Customers that used the online booking service on Cyber Monday received a percentage off of their parking reservations.
Deals during shopping season have been a staple over the last few decades, however for the parking industry, this is a fairly new phenomenon. As parking in general has become smarter and more automated, more customer and industry data has been logged within parking technology and in the software that is working behind the scenes. This is key for companies to develop and store data on how to better serve and ultimately profit off of those same consumers in the future.
For example, parking facilities have begun to capture data pertaining to frequent visitors of a location. Just as an online retailer logs a person’s email address after a purchase, car parks have been able to receive information when consumers access a parking facility. As a result, this new information is put to use when developing and updating a parking software system.
In the end this seemingly innocuous innovation is pushing the parking industry to new heights. Without the ability for parking hardware and software to gather consumer data, there would be fewer ways to offer drivers deals on parking. Not only that, but without parking data storage, the industry would not be able to learn from consumer trends and as a result would be much less efficient.
Although the discount codes, shopping deals, and holiday season as a whole will end, the parking industry will have been able to learn from this acceleration in consumerism and standardize parking methods of the future.