Greetings users,
I am looking to chat with those of you have the amazing conundrum of multiple parking garages, you don't own, and automated pay boxes. Do you pre-sell a specific garage and send out the required voucher for that garage's reader machine? Do you make your patron exchange a voucher printed from Tessitura for a parking garage ticket at your box office? Do you have an agreement that those garages provide a live person starting a certain time before the show starts to a certain after the show ends? In essence, I'm looking for all the creative ways you all handle parking. Being in downtown Seattle, parking is premium and a big deal to our patrons.
Any and all suggestions/thoughts/comments/answers to the meaning of life are all appreciated.
Chris Cuhel
The 5th Avenue Theatre
Thanks for the response Nicole. Our problem is that one of our parking garages is going from having attendants to being totally self-serve. They seem to want to work with us and we are hoping that the automated machines they pick can read bar codes. Our other garages are currently staffed with attendants but we also want to plan for an eventuality of those garages losing their attendants as well. There in lies "the riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key".
We're starting to explore the possibility of selling prepaid parking at a local parking garage that we do not own, but partner with. It's mainly self-serve, but they have an attendant there on busy nights to respond to customer service issues. Right now our patrons can prepay online through the parking garage, then they're emailed a a bar code to scan in and out of the garage; or, they can get a ticket when they pull in, pay in the lobby at a kiosk, and scan the ticket as they exit.
We'd like for our patrons to pay for parking at the same time they're buying their tickets to provide a seamless experience.
Their software has an API, so it seems feasible that we could pass data back to their system after a patron purchases parking and then they would send an email with a bar code generated from their system. We're waiting to get access to their documentation so we can start exploring further.
Has anyone else done something similar?
That sounds interesting Christina. We are finding out now that two of our garages will be going completely attendant free. We're tossing around the idea of having a link or something in the purchase path that the patron can click on to be directed to the parking garage website. Of course this is all still a work in progress. We want to remove ourselves from the purchase of those parking passes. The downfall...patrons will now have to pick a garage in advance versus when they get here.
More to come...