You’ve got great retailers. A beautiful centre. Delicious food. Plenty of reasons for people to visit. But there’s one thing that can make or break the entire experience before a shopper has even reached the first shop: The car park.
Take your asset or centre management hat off for a second. Think about your last trip to a shopping centre as a shopper.
You arrive. You’re looking for a space. You’re circling. Someone cuts in front of you. You finally find a spot – only to discover you’re miles from the entrance.
Sound familiar?
Those first few minutes can set the tone for the entire visit.
The parking experience is the welcome mat
We spend enormous amounts of time thinking about what happens inside a shopping centre – the stores, food, lighting, music, signage and customer service.
But shoppers don’t magically appear at the front doors.
They arrive by car, navigate the car park, find a space, park, gather their bags, find the entrance and then start their shopping experience. Already, this is a journey, and they haven’t even entered the shopping centre yet! Is this the customer experience shopping centres want for their shoppers? Is this how centres remain competitive?
If it’s easy, seamless and stress-free, shoppers arrive feeling positive.
A confusing, frustrating or chaotic arrival means shoppers already walk through the doors annoyed and ready to leave. Not in the mood to shop. A planned shopping experience/day turns into a quick visit of popping in and getting out! And that’s a pretty difficult mood to shop your way out of.
You only get one first impression
That last thought is the one every centre should be trying to avoid.
Small frustrations have a big impact.
Make the first 10 minutes count. The smartest shopping centres think about the customer journey from road to retail – with parking playing its vital part.
Here are our top five reasons why centres need to invest time into making good parking experiences:
Convenience has commercial value
Removing friction can influence how customers perceive the centre, how easily they access it and potentially how long they remain there. If a customer finds the experience easy, they are more likely to come back, visit your retailers and businesses and spend more. Especially during peak periods, customers are spending more, and it’s crucial that they have a good experience.
Time is a competition
Every minute lost to parking friction is a minute less spent shopping, dining, enjoying entertainment and experiencing the centre. For customers, a great parking experience is often measured by one simple thing: how quickly and easily they can get on with their day. That’s why valet parking can be a solution to park more cars in less time and maximise the parking areas – making it an easy parking solution for customers that they are willing to pay for.
It can be a competitive advantage
We invest a lot of time and effort in research into where our customers come from, our trade area penetration, and the economic factors behind every dollar spent at a shopping centre. But it can be as simple as having a seamless arrival and departure experience that creates customer loyalty and explains why a customer chooses your centre over another.
Add-on services that provide customers with convenience, such as seamless valet processes, hands-free shopping, and easy-to-use car wash services, are equally as important to the overall experience.
Parking solutions are more than physical space
When we look at a centre, we look at the whole journey, from their website experience to the data available. At GPT’s Highpoint, valet parking users spend 87 per cent longer in the centre than the average customer – a longer dwell time that supports increased retail spending and a stronger trading environment and their valet parking solution means 24 per cent more cars are parked. When you’re assessing a service, access to data is essential for understanding the performance of your parking management efforts.
Modern valet operations can generate useful data around vehicle movements, customer frequency, dwell time, peak periods and utilisation, allowing centres to make more informed operational decisions.
Setting the tone
A happy shopper is more likely to spend more. The data from the Prescient Retail Sentiment Report (2024) reveals: “That the most satisfied customers spend over $200 each visit. Whilst there was some improvement in satisfaction levels amongst lower spenders between 2021 and 2024, the relationship between satisfaction and spend remains strong. So much so, that every 1 per cent increase in satisfaction is worth $12.50 per visit, suggesting centres that understand satisfaction and invest accordingly will reap the rewards. For every 1 per cent increase in satisfaction, spend increases by $12.50 per visit.”
So don’t underestimate the power of the first 10 minutes. A seamless arrival isn’t just an operational detail, it is the “opening statement” of the centre – it deserves the same attention as everything that happens after it.
- FCV has decades of experience with shopping centres, contact us for a free Operational Review of your centre while you can, ahead of the Christmas trading period. Visit our website to find out more about our parking services.
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