Posted: Sept, 11, 2020 11:35AM ET • 3 min read

Vehicle driving in a parkade with parking guidance system technology

An essential part of your role as a property or facility manager is to ensure visitors to your facilities have easy parking experiences. It’s up to you to make sure that the first and final impressions visitors have of your facility—the parking experience—is a positive one. Your parking lots need to be maintained and operated in a way that reflects your business, and makes managing the day-to-day of your parking program stress-free.

A main factor in creating seamless parking experiences is investing in signage and technology that makes wayfinding and navigating through your parking facility effortless. Let’s discuss a few essential wayfinding strategies that should be integrated into your parking operation logistics.

Signage

First and foremost, signage is required throughout your parking lot to guide visitors easily in and out of your car park. Whether directing patients to a nested parking lot on hospital grounds, distinguishing the difference between resident and visitor parking areas at a residential building, or directing travelers to the nearest departure gate at an airport, signage is the key to smooth parking experiences. Key considerations for signage throughout your parking facility are:

Digital signage: Digital and electronic displays are the most effective ways to capture attention. Although costs associated with digital signage are higher than others, you can guarantee it will achieve your goals.
Multilingual signage: In addition to English, it’s always a good idea to offer messaging in a country’s second language. However, if you know the majority of your visitors speak another language, it’s in your best interest to offer signage in that language as well. This can entice visitors to become repeat customers.
Universal communication: Your signage should include wording, symbols and colours that are universal and intuitively understood by your visitors.
Fonts and colour contrasts: Installing highly visible signage throughout your parking lots is necessary to helping your visitors find their way in and out of your car park. This can be done by using sans serif fonts, and ensuring high colour contrast between the parking sign’s messaging and background colour.
Ongoing maintenance: Once parking signage is installed, it’s important to make sure it’s well-maintained and that messaging is kept up to date.

Parking Guidance Systems

A parking guidance system allows your customers to easily and effectively locate available parking in your garage. A parking guidance system displays real-time occupancy of parking stalls, and reduces the time spent searching for available parking by 37%. This will minimize traffic in your lot.

In addition to helping drivers find an available parking stall, a camera-based parking guidance system can be integrated with a find-my-car-via-licence-plate kiosk, which is available for your patrons to use upon returning to your parking facility, either after their travels or a busy day.

Mapping Services

It’s likely that many of your visitors are following a GPS, such as Google Maps or Waze, to find their way to your parking facility. The GPS service doesn’t have to end once they arrive at your address. If your parking facility or campus covers a lot of ground, it’s a smart idea to register your property with web mapping services to make sure GPS technology works within your parking lots and property. This will allow your visitors to continue using the GPS service until they arrive at their final destination.

Applying a smart combination of the solutions above will substantially improve wayfinding throughout your parking facility.