Pre-Booked Airport Parking - The Only Way To Be Sure?

With all the hassle that the summer months bring to travellers taking their holidays abroad, the last thing that you would want to happen is to try and arrange your airport parking the week before only to find out that there are no places available at your airport. Or even worse, to arrive at the airport only to discover that every car park is booked out. Unfortunately, this appears to be a trend that is taking shape across the country's busiest airports.

10 years ago, if you wanted to drive to the airport, you were limited to a handful of expensive on-airport car parks and paying on arrival. As the popularity of airport parking increased, so too did the cost of the car parks as the availability of parking spaces decreased. Then came the concept of off-airport car parks, where passengers could enjoy greater availability and lower prices, allowing far more passengers to take advantage of airport parking, while providing enough spaces to cater for even the busiest of times. However, popularity for airport parking continued to grow, and 2003 witnessed something that had not been seen since the introduction of off-airport car parks… no availability, even when pre-booked a few days in advance.

Observations taken from our own website during the past couple of months has shown that the behaviour of car parks being fully booked has become even more common place across all the major suppliers, and in some of the UK's busiest airports such as Stansted and Gatwick, having no availability in any on or off-airport car parks booked up to a week in advance is become quite common. Airport Parking Shop has been fortunate, that due to its unique technology that compares the UK's top 5 parking providers, the incidences of no availability with all of the website's suppliers are still relatively small. However, the impact such a trend will have on the many websites that only have the ability to use 1 or 2 partners could be quite devastating.

With the busiest months of the year still ahead of us, it is likely that the lack of availability will continue to rise. Therefore to guarantee a chance of enjoying the cost and time saving benefits of airport parking, it is advisable to book well in advance, as in general terms, the fewer of something there is, the more likely it is that the cost will go up.