Valet Parking Industry Finds ZipPark System Is Key

ZipPark President Barry Lazowski is hoping a string of recent successes in deploying his company's zControl Valet Parking Management System is a sign that the parking industry is catching up with technology.

The heart of ZipPark's solution is its zControl software, designed for airport, hotel and restaurant valet-parking facilities. The system allows these operations to easily collect information about customers and their vehicles, using the vehicle license plate as a tracking number for the central database, Lazowski said.

"For years, we looked for a product geared toward this industry," Lazowski said. "We finally just decided to build it ourselves."

ZipPark's most recent and largest project to date was many years in the making, Lazowski said. The deployment at Washington's Dulles International Airport went live in February, he said. Other customers include the Ritz Carlton and Marriott hotel chains.

>> ZipPark system enables facilities to easily collect information about customers and their vehicles.

The system at Dulles airport issues bar-coded, multipart tickets, tracks the location of vehicles, reserves parking spots, calculates fees based on flexible structure rates, reports business activity in real time, and can leverage the Internet for remote access.

West Hartford, Conn.-based ZipPark integrates its software with a variety of desktop and handheld system configurations, depending upon the needs of the customer. It also provides integration services to hook up the POS systems with customers' back-end database servers.

As part of its solution, ZipPark uses the IBM SurePOS 500 touch terminal, which runs Microsoft Windows 2000 and is backed with an IBM one-year, 24x7 on-site service guarantee.

For mobile POS solutions, Lazowski said the company uses Microsoft Windows for Pocket PC on rugged handheld devices from Intermec and Symbol Technologies. ZipPark also uses Hewlett-Packard's iPaq or Casio's Cassiopeia handhelds, he said.

Lazowski said the solution installed at Dulles includes four desktop POS cashier terminals and two IBM stand-alone kiosks that allow customers to pay for parking themselves. In addition, eight wireless realtime handheld PCs are used by parking employees to cash out customers during peak times, process valet tickets for those waiting in line, and help them retrieve vehicles from two lots.

"The system has also been integrated into the larger [Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority] networks," Lazowski said. "So we have a central server set up that has this remote valet operation integrated into it."

Meenu Kochhar, valet manager at Dulles, said the reporting system's efficiency and security aspects, such as the ability to track the whereabouts of the 400 to 500 vehicles valet-parked at the airport each day, has improved dramatically in a short period of time.

Many customers are regulars, and the ability to access their accounts by entering a license plate is a welcomed efficiency, Kochhar said. The old system was entirely manual and included the completion of many paper forms and reports, she said.

"It's much faster when you have a database stored for repeat customers," she said. "We're still doing little tweaks with the system because we just got it, but things are going great so far."

Valet employees at Dulles have completed training and are now working the lots with the handheld mobile devices, Kochhar said. "At first, they were nervous,and so were we,because a lot of these people have never been in front of a computer," she said. "But the training went well, and now it's OK. They love it."

ZipPark's valet and self-park POS solution installations can cost anywhere from about $10,000 to $500,000, depending upon the needs of the facility, Lazowski said.

He credits specialty distributor, ScanSource, Greenville, S.C., with helping ZipPark hook up with IBM and for providing the 12-employee company with testing units, loaners and other support when it first tested the software and solution sets.

"We are really starting to fly now, sales-wise," he said. "ScanSource has helped us really with everything, and now people are really starting to take a look at the product and the solution."