Take Control of Your Parking Lots...

Are you looking for new ways to generate revenue from your parking lots? Are you searching for innovative ways to streamline your parking operations? Are you looking to show fans incremental value before they enter the stadium?

Click and Park recently formed a partnership with Standard Parking, Soldier Field's parking operator, to provide Chicagoans with special parking services when attending games and events at the stadium. Click and Park recently launched a website to support the initiative and provide fans with a way to pre-pay for guaranteed spaces... Click and Park is implementing its pre-pay parking service by offering a limited number of pre-paid "print at home" parking passes for select lots, which the company can designate and block off ahead of time.

Click and Park's pre-pay parking service is the perfect way to create artificial demand for parking (and hopefully in turn, drive incremental revenue and/or ease the consumers experience on-site). Sports marketers all understand the demand for premium parking near the stadium and should begin to investigate similar methods to create artificial demand.

Once more organizations pursue similar pre-pay methods, will we see teams offer exclusive benefits for certain parking sections? For instance, if the Miami Dolphins implement a pre-pay process, they can market different "exclusive benefits" opportunities to fans who are willing to pay a slight premium. The team can offer Lot D parking for $35 (as opposed to $20 regular parking), but provide season ticket holders with two (2) vouchers that print out on the pre-paid parking sheet for an exclusive pre-game autograph signing in the parking lot (leveraging team alumni, cheerleaders, mascot, coaches, personnel, personalities, etc.).

To fill stadium lots (as opposed to neighborhood lots), teams can also begin incorporating food concessionaires couponing with these parking passes (attached coupons that consumers can tear off) to demonstrate incremental value to fans.

Teams can also consider integrating/selling a corporate partner on an opportunity to brand pre-paid parking lot passes. Automobile companies and car part manufacturers can brand utilize such opportunities to drive consumers to retail (feature a "bobblehead offer with purchase/test drive" on the parking pass that catches consumers when they are open to engagement. With pre-pay parking methods, the opportunities are endless for sports marketers... Now take advantage of it!