In some ways, car parks are a very straightforward product. You need to leave your car somewhere, and a business lets you use their facility for a set period of time in exchange for a fee. As simple as that.
Yet from an optimisation perspective, car parks offer an interesting set of opportunities and challenges linking digital marketing, revenue management and operations.
A Physical Product Sold Digitally
Many large car parks operate like digital products - particularly where parking is a secondary purchase alongside a pre-booked flight, ferry, event or stay. You reserve online, receive confirmation emails, see ads when searching for parking near an event. The principal customer acquisition funnel is entirely digital.
But the product itself is completely physical. It's a fixed number of spaces in a specific location that can't be moved or scaled without great expense. This creates some unique tensions. Your digital marketing and UX might be optimised, but if your car park is in an inconvenient location, none of that matters. Conversion attribution becomes tricky too - someone could see your product online, but only book weeks later, or even pay at the machine without ever completing a digital transaction.
You also get unusual data. A booking tells you when someone plans to arrive and leave, but this is just the customer’s intention. You have to wait for retrospective information about the visit to know what actually happened to your physical inventory.
Revenue Management with Constrained Inventory
Car parks operate under the same constraints as hotels or airlines - you have a finite inventory that perishes if not sold. An empty space at 2pm can't be sold retrospectively at 3pm.
Demand is often derived rather than primary. Customers rarely plan parking first, so booking curves follow the patterns of trips or events. This makes forecasting dependent on external demand patterns, with usage varying drastically through the year. Like hotels, car parks face highly seasonal demand, which complicates capacity planning.
Unlike international travel, where airlines compete primarily with other airlines, car parks face competition from entirely different transport modes. A customer choosing between your facility and public transport is weighing convenience and cost in a fundamentally different way.
Changes to the availability, pricing and appeal of buses, trains, taxis and ride-shares create pressures that can boost or diminish your potential customer base year on year. Your occupancy isn't just about your pricing versus other car parks, but whether driving itself remains the preferred option. Moreover, public transport disruptions can create temporary demand spikes when other modes become unavailable, adding another layer of volatility to forecasting. All the while, the day-to-day unpredictability of roll-up bookings, overstays and no-shows further complicates inventory management.
Technology and Operational Data
The shift to camera-based systems (ANPR) improves customer experience and removes physical barriers, but it also introduces new challenges. Cameras aren't always reliable - dirty plates, poor lighting and unusual fonts all create potential misreads. With minimal staffing, errors can go undetected without robust exception handling.
This affects your data quality. Operations generate increasingly probabilistic data that needs careful reconciliation - matching partial reads, dealing with duplicate records, handling parking sessions that don't make sense. That same data enables better forecasting, clearer no-show patterns, and fraud detection - commercial benefits that come with increased data management requirements.
What the Data Can Show
Working with this kind of data doesn't solve problems instantly, but it does highlight where the complexity lies and where to focus efforts.
Booking curves are a good example. Understanding your typical advance purchase patterns means you can spot when sales are soft relative to expectations - even if you're currently at full capacity. That visibility creates the opportunity for tactical pricing or marketing interventions when you still have time to react. You can examine how your sales funnel is trending - across reach, conversion and cost - to identify which changes will deliver the results you need. Over time, tracking which tactics work best feeds back into your marketing planning.
Getting the most value from fixed, time-sensitive inventory whilst managing external factors beyond your control will never be simple. But understanding booking patterns, channel performance, and how these relate to observed demand helps ground decisions in reality.
At Project50 we love getting to grips with data to help you simplify your decision making. If there's anything you want a fresh pair of eyes on, or just fancy a chat, book in a 30 minute call with Pierre.
