Parclick provides online reservations for long stay parking in official car parks. In the case of airports, it is a strategic partner of non-aviation managers aiming to increase car park occupation and total non-aviation revenue. Parclick’s end-to-end online car park reservation solution has two components – the booking website and central reservation system. Iván Rodríguez, Chief Business Development Officer, Parclick, explained that these two components work together as a complete booking channel, but the central reservation system also accepts bookings from third parties too. “This means that airports can embed the booking process into their websites while our central reservation system handles everything else,” he said. “For airports that already have a booking website, we provide an alternative, high performing, booking channel.”
He added that Parclick’s objective is “to become the ‘e-commerce team’ for our partner airports working at a success fee out of each reservation made. As simple as that.”
Iván Rodríguez, Chief Business Development Officer, Parclick: “We will definitely expand outside Europe. Our mission is to become the largest parking booking agent in the world, disrupting the parking industry and making it more transparent and accessible to our customers. While at the same time bringing our associated car parks into the digital era. Therefore, the world is our playground.”
Regarding parking assets, Parclick provides support in two major fields: Increasing occupation, and increasing total revenue. “We manage to increase occupation by bringing new customers that are currently using other solutions like low-cost car parks, taxi, city shuttle or rides from friends or family,” Rodríguez commented. “In the particular case of airports, we found out that price perception plays an important part when booking. As an example, in a recent study we did in Portugal we found out that Portuguese drivers believe official airport car parks to be twice as expensive as their low-cost competitors, although being actually cheaper! For that reason, some of our airport campaigns are aimed at setting up the real, up-to-date value for money when using official car parks.”
In terms of increasing total revenue, Parclick’s solution allows airports to do things like setting up a reservation fee in car parks with high occupancy ratio; use yield management techniques to increase prices in peak seasons in order to maximise revenue; or reduce prices in off-peak seasons to attract new customers with a lower willingness to pay.
“It does not end there, our solution also helps to increase other non-aviation revenues,” Rodríguez asserted. “Right now airports can use it to promote shops, restaurants or other non-aeronautical services. And soon it will allow the sale of products such as fast track, baggage wrap, VIP Lounge or WiFi. These products combined can create a competitive advantage over low-cost car parks, and help double non-aviation average tickets.”
The collaborations with Nice and Brindisi airports provide two excellent examples of the solution applied to different environments. In June 2014, Brindisi was Parclick’s first collaboration with an airport. “Our system made it possible for travellers and travel agencies at Brindisi to book car parking in advance. Our success was immediate, and soon occupation levels, and parking revenue, rose on all car parks thanks to online reservations,” Rodríguez noted.
There are plans to partner with 10 major European airports by the end of 2015, and with the 50 busiest European airports by 2017. “The best formula to achieve the objectives we set for 2015, 2016 and 2017 is to make sure that we keep generating great results for our current and future airport partners, and letting them speak for us within the sector,” Rodríguez said. “From here, our strategy relies on two pillars: Innovation and leveraging our assets. Regarding innovation, we aim to offer the best end-to-end solution for online car park reservations and other non-aviation online product reservations. Our R&D team is completely devoted to this endeavour. By leveraging our assets we mean to use our knowledge both in the online market and software development, our customer base, geographical presence and affiliate network, to provide the best-in-class solution for the top management to increase non-aviation revenues.”
