4 September 2018
Imagine you’re a real estate agent and you’re responsible for the visits to houses all over the city center of Rotterdam. At the moment, you’re using a parking app or if it’s not supported, buying tickets at a ticket machine. It’s time consuming and not only that, you always need to pay for a minimum of half an hour parking.
After a strong cup of coffee, you start your busy day in good spirits. You get in your car and head to the city center. Upon arrival of the first house, you park your car on the street and you start looking for a sign that can tell you the zone code. You always need this when you start your parking session! After searching, you find the correct code and you log your session in your parking app.
You have a good viewing; the potential tenants seem very interested and are asking a bunch of questions. The viewing runs over and you’re now running late for your next appointment. You quickly hop in your car and head to the next house….little do you know, you’ve forgot to stop your parking session.
Since the parking apps are rapidly becoming the new standard in paid parking, we have omitted the paper tickets in this blog.
The forgotten to stop your parking session
Forgetting a parking session is an easy to make mistake; you’re in a hurry, you’re busy with something else or simply simply do not think about it. It happens so often that 95% of all employees indicate that they regularly forget to sign off a parking session.
Unfortunately, it isn’t possible for parking apps to cancel a transaction afterwards; not even when it concerns a forgotten parking session. The parking app pays your parking costs in advance to the municipality, after which they are later settled to the driver. It is the driver’s responsibility to ensure that the parking session is properly started and stopped. The costs incurred by forgetting a parking session can not be compensated!
The parking session continues until the end of the paid parking time. For example, if you’d park on the canals in Amsterdam, your parking session will continue until 12 o’clock at night at a rate of € 5 per hour. If you’d park at the Waterlooplein in Amsterdam, your parking session will even continue until 04:00. Forgetting to stop a parking session after a business lunch can cause the parking costs to mount up to € 65!
Reminder service
As a reminder of your running parking session, all parking apps offer a ‘reminder service’; this can consist of a push notification, an e-mail or a text message. Most parking apps offer a free push notification e-mail option. For the text service, you’d have to pay between € 0.25 and € 0.35. Why would you choose the paid service?
When using the reminder service, you obviously want to make sure it grabs your attention properly. Unlike an e-mail and a push notification, a text message does not depend on your internet connection. The paid service will ensure that you won’t forget your parking sessions, no matter your internet connection.
With most parking apps, the text message is sent every two hours. This means, when you’re parking for only half an hour, you’d pay still pay for an hour and a half too much! The reminder service should be seen as a tool to limit the financial damage; not a way to totally prevent it.
Stopping failures
In addition to forgetting to log off your parking session, it is also possible that the stoppage simply does not work. There are several ways in which the logout can go wrong, and you (incorrectly) pay for the parking costs incurred.
Crashes of the parking app can ensure that you are convinced that your parking session has stopped; while this does not have to be the case. If your app falters, it is very difficult to prove this. In many cases you will therefore pay for the costs incurred due to a technical defect of your telephone. Not ideal!
In addition, it is also possible that the battery of your smartphone runs out after you have started a parking session. Are you on your way alone, or does your co-driver have no smartphone? Then you can only stop your parking session at home. Since the parking time simply ticks, we can imagine that this will be a very frustrating ride home. You can only hope that you are not parked on the canals!
Parkd
Forgotten parking sessions, errors and expensive reminders increase your parking costs very quickly. At Parkd, we understand how frustrating this can be.
Parkd’s world first technology makes it possible to fully automate your parking session. Parkd starts, stops and pays automatically for all your parking sessions.You’ll never pay too much again and parking fines are a thing of the past.
On top of that, it is possible to save 90% on parking administration. How? Parkd sends a single invoice for all of a fleet’s parking sessions, registered per license plate.
Are you ready to get started with Parkd?