Travel Buyers Increase Use Of Off-Airport Parking Facilities

<B>Travel Buyers Increase Use Of Off-Airport Parking Facilities</B>

By Lynn Woods

As corporate travel managers seek to control costs due to tighter budgets, they're increasingly turning to off-airport parking services as an economic alternative to chauffeured sedan service or on-airport parking. Increasingly, travel managers are negotiating preferred rates with local and national airport parking services offering multiple locations, valet service, negotiated rates and such perks as free coffee, bottled water and newspapers.

"We're looking at cutting back limo services and using off-airport parking lots instead," said one New Jersey-based corporate travel manager. At Newark Airport, "it's getting competitive--these services offer corporate rates and reservations on the Web. Once you arrive, they give you a claim check number and have your car waiting under a canopy with the lights on," he added.

Indeed, Thom Zak, vice president of sales at The Parking Spot, a wholly owned subsidiary of PRG Reality Group with 11 locations at eight airports, noted that corporate business "has increased dramatically across all markets" in the past six months. "Even though parking is a much lower spend than car rental, it's a controllable expense," he said. "As corporations tighten their travel budgets, off-airport parking services provide a real opportunity."

Zak estimated that by using such services as The Parking Spot, "the minimal savings to corporations is probably 25 percent versus what the company is spending now" on parking, thanks to corporate discounts. Other benefits are convenience, with the shuttle bus picking up travelers every five to seven minutes; safety, especially important to women travelers otherwise faced with retrieving their cars from dark, lonely, remote airport lots; and speed--at its lots at Los Angeles and Atlanta, customers can sign up for "Easy Exit" service, in which a receipt automatically is printed out as they swipe their credit card into a device upon leaving the lot.

Assurance of a space--something travelers can't take for granted at crowded on-airport lots--is another advantage. While The Parking Spot doesn't provide guarantee of a space in its corporate contracts, Zak said, The Parking Spot has never turned away a corporate customer, and it is experimenting with a new reservation system at its location in Dallas.

Susan Folds, who is corporate communications manager with responsibility for the travel department at Printpack Inc., a flexible packaging materials company in Atlanta with an annual air spend of $4 million, said the main reason her company contracted with The Parking Spot is lack of space at Hartsfield International. "Most of our travelers don't even try to park there," she said. Although Printpack doesn't mandate use of off-airport parking, it promotes its preferred vendor agreement with The Parking Spot.

Valet service is not available at The Parking Spot's Atlanta location, but even so, the company offers a superior experience over any lot at Hartsfield, Folds said. A prime advantage is safety: "The facility is fenced in and the bus driver waits until you get into your car," she said. Printpack just signed an agreement to use The Parking Spot's facilities at Los Angeles, St. Louis and Dallas as well.

Zak said that one of the biggest obstacles in approaching the corporate market is the persistent perception among travel managers and travelers that "we're like remote parking" at the airport. Another challenge is spurring awareness of the cost of parking and ground transportation, minor items that traditionally were ignored. But the budget squeeze is causing many managers to wake up fast.

"Companies that had not shown any interest before are now using private parking services," said Rick West, president and COO at AviStar Airport Parking, which has locations at the three New York airports as well as Chicago O'Hare, Philadelphia and Hartford-Bradley in Connecticut. "Because of the move to cut travel costs," West said, "some companies that had not looked to our line item are now considering us. Each person you take out of a limo and put into a private car saves $100 a trip."

AviStar's roster of corporate clients includes Bristol-Meyers Squibb, Citigroup, Honeywell, IBM, Lucent, Novartis and United Technologies. West said that approximately 18 percent of its customers are corporate travelers. The four-and-a-half-year-old company offers valet parking at all of its facilities, a flight checking service so customers know their gate numbers in advance, reservations through its Web site or toll-free number and a guaranteed space for its largest accounts.

AviStar has formed alliances with other private off-airport parking companies to help corporate clients with their parking needs in other locations. The company also can provide quarterly reports on the number of cars parked, average length of stay, and actual spend to its corporate accounts.

One popular service is express check-out, in which the receipt is waiting in the car upon pickup. The service is available to customers who pay a $15 fee to join the Express Club. Members also qualify for free parking and can earn certificates for free car washes or upgrades to an indoor facility. For customers in the New York area who are flying out of one airport and returning to another, AviStar will transfer cars from one facility to another for an extra charge. "We've seen growth in this service," West said.

Like its competitors, AviStar's rates are lower than the daily parking rate at the airport, but higher than the rate at the remote lot. At Newark, for example, AviStar charges $14.85 a day--compared with $24 on-airport at the daily lot and $8 at the remote lot. However, large corporate accounts qualify for a 10 percent to 25 percent discount, West said.

During the first year of a contract, AviStar bases the discount on the corporation's potential use of its parking service. In return, the corporate account must agree to feature AviStar on its intranet travel suite and promote the service in other ways to its employees. A few clients have private Internet pages, listing rate information, directions and other helpful information.

One large corporation based in New Jersey that has contracted with AviStar also promotes use of the vendor in other locations, according to the travel manager. "We use them wherever we can," she said, even though parking traditionally has been arranged at the local level. She said one fringe benefit of using AviStar was that company cars parked on the lot get a sprucing up, thanks to such optional maintenance services as detail work, oil changes and car washings. Even more valued is the speedy valet service, use of which is restricted to upper management. "The time and distance it takes to get to the offsite lot is well worth it," she said, "because drivers are dropped off at the door."

For some corporations, off-airport parking services are nothing new. AT&T, for example, has had contracts with vendors at Newark and Seattle-Tacoma airports for years, according to spokeswoman Cindy Neale. "We've always encouraged our employees to use the most economical way to get to the airport. Often they drive their own cars," she said.

But plenty of other corporate travel managers still have no clue about how much they could potentially save on this overlooked expenditure. "We have been actively calling corporations to find out if they're interested, and a lot didn't know that we had a corporate rate available," said Jeff Okyle, senior vice president of business development at Standard Parking, which operates two lots at Los Angeles International Airport and is part of Apcoa/Standard Parking, a nationwide private parking operator. Other perks that routinely cause surprise are Standard Parking's reservation service and its guarantee of a space for corporate accounts.