Last week, ParkHub joined representatives from Paciolan and Mississippi State to discuss the current movement towards contactless event operations at universities across the United States.
Led by Paciolan’s SVP of Marketing, Craig Ricks, the webinar covered how parking technology supports the overall fan journey. “We always talk about driveway to driveway – what was that full game day experience,” said Ricks. “The first thing someone might experience is parking – at your venue, on campus, or near your stadium. So that’s critical. We want to enable technology and have a great fan and donor experience.”
Throughout the session, Chris Elliston, ParkHub’s SVP Enterprise, offered insights on contactless trends at destinations across ParkHub’s foothold of universities, professional sports and entertainment venues, and recreation sites: “We’re seeing two things – one is on the payments side where folks are getting out of cash as fast as possible. So it’s a mad dash out of cash… Secondly it can go missing occasionally, either on accident or on purpose, and three there’s no data behind a cash transaction. As we’re moving towards a more data-driven, digitized world, cash is becoming obsolete.”
“The other piece,” Elliston continued, “is the prepaid pass side, where Paciolan comes in. Historically, its been you get your season pass in the mail and that’s the extent of parking. You might be able to drive up and pay cash in some places or not. It’s just kind of been sort of a stodgy kind of world. We now can offer prepaid passes to both season ticket holders as well as day-of guests. So, I can buy a prepaid pass through Paciolan’s system, whether it’s the day before, the morning of, or five minutes before, we can scan and authenticate that pass.”
Mike Richey, Executive Senior Associate AD at Mississippi State, supported the webinar with his experience commencing the university’s football season operations amid the COVID-19 pandemic, “There was sort of a hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait, to all of a sudden hurry up and go. So you’re trying to make all these last minute decisions about how the season was going to work.”
As one of the first clients to adopt ParkHub and Paciolan’s integrated solution, Mississippi State has leverage ParkHub’s technology at a range of the university’s athletic events. When it came to making decisions about parking, Richey noted, “Just to be able to be flexible and deliver things electronically, and deliver things to mobile devices, print-at-home and all those types of methods, I think was really more important this year than we could have ever possibly imagined. Being able to make those decisions was critical for us.”
View the full Paciolan webinar, Transforming Fan Arrival from the First Point of Contactless, below and find out more about ParkHub and Paciolan’s integrated solution here.