Kinnick Stadium draws around 100,000 football fans on game days. Eddie Etsey, University of Iowa Athletics’ Director of Information Technology, is charged with managing the high volume of visitors and driving an exceptional event experience. For the 2019 football season, Etsey deployed ParkHub technology to support parking operations and help Hawkeyes fans easily find and pay for parking.
UI Athletics' parking operators experienced difficulty quantifying available parking spaces during events. Often they resorted to manual car counts to temporarily closing parking lots, manually counting cars, and reopening them to meet capacity.
UI Athletics’ ticketing provider, Paciolan, allows fans to purchase parking passes along with their tickets in advance of the event. Parking operators needed the ability to authenticate or reissue the prepaid passes in order to optimize their management.
Due to the demand for parking space, single-game fans needed assurance that they could easily secure parking on game-day. At times fans would go as far as to physically "reserve" parking spots in the stadium lots for fellow members of their party.
UI Athletics parked 34,766 vehicles during the 2019 football season.
67% of the parking transactions in 2019 were prepaid Paciolan passes.
During the busiest event, 1,454 vehicles were parked in an hour - 1 car every 3 seconds.
1,849 invalid / duplicate passes were detected protecting $36.5K in revenue.
ParkHub started by implementing their contactless mobile point-of-sale (mPOS) solution which processes and tracks cash, credit card, and NFC (Apple Pay and Android Pay) payments. The devices also allow UI Athletics’ parking attendants to scan and validate prepaid parking passes supplied by the University’s ticketing provider, Paciolan. Attendants were equipped to weed out invalid or duplicate passes and reissue lost passes.
Management gained access to ParkHub’s business intelligence suite which connects directly to the mPOS devices. The software enables the UI Athletics’ team to gain a real-time understanding of lot occupancy, which eradicated the need to manually count cars. The system also provides real-time transactional data and robust reports.
“ParkHub is one of the best game day technologies we implemented this past year. While it’s proven a boon for fans, it’s also provided new insight into traffic flow during game days. Their business intelligence platform allows us to access real-time parking revenue and inventory data which helps get fans into events more easily and conveniently. The ParkHub team has been a great to work with as well.”
Eddie Etsey, Chief Technology Officer
University of Iowa Athletics
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