Parking System Gives VIP Customers Preferred Treatment
January, 2009
By Rudor “Dori” Tiech
The 3P Parking garage, located in downtown Montreal, Canada, is a multi-use indoor three-story facility. It serves a diverse clientele – workers in nearby office buildings, shoppers and patrons of a retail center just above the garage, and residents of a nearby condominium.
The 140 spaces available in this garage are usually full, thanks to its premium central location. Motorists using the facility can opt for a monthly reserved spot assigned to their vehicle or a monthly space in any unreserved space in the lot; or they can pay for a space on a daily basis, if there is adequate room. The leasing cost for a reserved space is about one-third more than a traditional monthly space.
3P Parking’s clients who pay for a reserved space on a monthly basis were having a challenging time. “Reserved” signs, marking their spaces, did not seem to keep others from parking in them. Yehuda Scohaczevski, whose family owns and operates 3P, said they had tried everything to ensure that reserved parking spaces remained open for those who leased them.
“We tried bigger signs, more signs. We told our attendants to be more vigilant. We even tried parking cones, but nothing seemed to work,” Scohaczevski said. 3P owed it to their reserved parking clients to find a way to ensure that their spaces were open and available whenever they needed to park at the garage. That’s when they learned about the MySpot 200 barrier
The unit is a low-cost, self-contained, remote-controlled barrier that secures a parking space with the click of a button from inside a vehicle. The barrier is easily secured to the floor of the parking garage. Drivers simply push a button and the barrier in front of their space moves down so a vehicle can be parked.
When leaving the space, the driver raises the barrier from inside the car in a similar fashion, so that the space stays reserved. 3P tried one of the barriers for about a month, to see how effective it was. The reserved space was always available for the “trial” client. 3P was so happy with the results that they decided to fit each of the reserved spaces with a MySpot 200 barrier. Today, the facility has 12 reserved spaces with the specially designed barriers.
Scohaczevski said that more clients are seeking the reserved monthly spaces in the garage because of the security of knowing that their space will always be available. “The clients are insisting on having the MySpot 200 barriers installed. We wouldn’t have a reserved space without it, and there are never any more client complaints,” he said.
An interesting psychological aspect of the barriers seems to be that even when clients forget to raise the barrier after leaving, other motorists respect the reserved space and will not park there.
“They see the reserved sign, notice the type of barrier that is there, and realize they do not belong in the reserved space,” Scohaczevski said. “It’s a wonderful system. It has given us more credibility with our clients, who know they can depend on having their parking space ready and waiting for them when they need it.”
Rudor “Dori” Teich is President of Designated Parking Corp. He can be reached at dori.teich@dp-corp.com.
