0871 360 2443To do this you have to understand how an off airport parking company works or how the airport itself operates it’s parking and pricing.
Off airport car parks
Taking an off airport car parking first, they are always looking to balance their car park to maximise the profit for each single day.
Advertising prices in the old days was mostly done by advertising in local newspapers within a say a 100-mile radius of the airport and a few national papers. The airport car park operators would then send out to customers a small brochure outlining the security aspects of the car park, location and distance to the airport along a price list for basically summer and winter.
Car parks were not very sophisticated in those days with the number of cars coming into the car park added to the those staying less those going out that day to arrive at an overnight figure. This would be fine if the cars were going out first, but unfortunately airlines work completely the opposite way, flying departing passengers to their destinations and picking arrivals up on the way back.
The car park fills in the morning and slowly looses cars from two onwards and then the whole process begins again at about 4am the following morning. When you also consider that Saturday and Sundays account for around 40% of all weekly movements the pressure is on to balance the car park.
The internet and computers and have completely changed the way they operate both in advertising, pricing and organising the product.
Taking advertising first, whilst some national and very local newspaper advertising still goes on most is totally reliant on the internet where prices can change daily. Forward prices are loaded onto a booking engine taking into account the day of the week, time of the year, bank holidays and most of all children’s holidays.
You may ask why does the day of the week affect price; simply because resources are under the greatest pressure for two days of the week, especially at the bigger airports such as Gatwick, Heathrow, Manchester and Stansted and the airport company may drop prices for bookings Monday to Friday to obtain a better working spread.
By doing this they may even make more money by taking more cars over the week. If you have too many cars coming in Saturday morning you may be forced to stop taking bookings because insufficient are leaving although by midnight you could end up with less cars than you started with.By having a better spread the highs and lows are less and you actually take in more cars and ultimately make more money. Computers are now used to both predict usage at any point in the day and prices will climb or fall to achieve optimum positions.
