Venue parking differs from most other parking operations since the occupancy rates vary from practically zero occupancy to an overbooked parking. Customer behavior typically leads into a situation where parking fills up right before the beginning of the event which leads into congestion and idle driving by customers seeking for a parking space. This hassle is often mitigated with large number of staff manually guiding customers to the available spaces or less occupied parts of the facility. Quite naturally, this approach is not the most effective guidance solution, and it also involves significant staffing costs which offsets the revenues made from parking.
The 2022 Men’s International Ice Hockey World Championship will be hosted by Finland from 13 to 29 May 2022. The host cities of the World Championships are Tampere and Helsinki, of which Tampere’s brand-new Nokia Arena will serve as the main venue of the games. Aimo Park Arena is a parking facility located next to Nokia Arena in Tampere. Nokia Arena has a capacity of 13,455 people visiting venues, so well guided parking is essential factor making arriving and leaving the event as smooth as possible for the driving customers. Aimo Park Arena offers parking space for more than 400 driving visitors including disabled parking as well as spaces for charging electric vehicles.
Portier parking guidance displays are installed at the entrances of the parking facility indicating the occupancy rate in the garage. The calculation as well as parking guidance is carried out by the space specific Portier parking sensors showing either red or green LEDs for the parking space searching drivers. All Portier products are connected to Portier HOST, our unique parking guidance platform connecting all used technologies into single a single, seamless user experience. The calculation data in the garage is also forwarded to Tampere city’s street network guidance system via Portier HOST. So, data transfer is easy between Portier HOST and third-party solutions via API as well.
As with any other parking, venue parking is the first impression for a person who is arriving to the event with their own vehicle and smooth parking experience has a significant impact on their impression about the entire event. Effective guidance will improve customer experience and as it also eliminates the time needed for parking, it leaves customers more time to be spent at the event and services there. At the same time, parking guidance solution will decrease operational staffing costs and resources needed to organize the staff.
Another aspect of venue parking is the exit – departures occur in an even shorter time-span than entries which leads into severe congestion and traffic problems. Whilst this problem will be nearly impossible to eliminate completely, Portier offers also dynamic traffic management solutions that can help to manage the exit traffic and to guide it to less crowded exits in case there are multiple exit options. Parking is the first and last impression for a visiting customer and hence smooth exit will increase the likelihood of customers returning!
Good luck & play hard, especially team Finland!
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