Event Parking Strategies
By Elvis Reyes, CAPP
Parking operations play a vital role in ensuring an event goes well. Identifying the consumer who comes to a venue and “knowing your crowd” is key to an operator’s success. A great example of this is the Amalie Arena in Tampa, Florida.
The Arena is the home of the Tampa Bay Lighting and hosts hundreds of concerts annually. Understanding the difference between a hockey crowd and a concert crowd has shown to be key to everyone’s success. A hockey crowd that gets to enjoy 40 home games a year knows where to go, how to prepay for parking, and how to get out of the downtown area safely and quickly. A concert crowd, on the other hand, needs intense education on how to get around.
What does this mean for the events team?
More collaboration between the venue, parking team, and traffic control is needed for the concert crowd. Should the same effort and manpower be put into the regular event crowd? There should be a standard operating procedure for all event parking operations with an understanding of how and when to add additional resources. Without that basic understanding, most event attendees will suffer before even arriving at the front door.
Elvis Reyes, CAPP, is a General Manager for The Car Park. He can be reached at ereyes@thecarpark.com.