In 2014, American Airlines Center CEO Craig Courson was looking for a way to digitize his customers’ experiences. He wanted to track payments, to accept credit card transactions, and to connect the journey of venue attendees from the parking lot through the entry gates and beyond. To do all that, Courson turned to a local Dallas startup called ParkHub.
The home of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and NHL’s Dallas Stars provided ticketing through Ticketmaster, but pre-purchased parking came in the form of tearable strips at the bottom of parking passes bundled with season tickets. Most fans paid cash for parking on game day. Those who showed up with only credit cards were turned around.
“They were pulling cars over, turning them around, and directing them to an ATM machine where they were able to extract cash out, and getting hit with a fee,” said George Baker, CEO of ParkHub. “So higher paying, and poor customer experience.”
Baker pitched his startup as a way to digitize the parking system. Courson offered him a test.
“I said ‘Look, I’ll give you guys a trial period. I’ll be your very first customer. I will put you in touch with Ticketmaster—with the right folks—but I want you to write an integration back and forth,’” Courson said.
“I had been searching for somebody to do these integrations for years, and I must have had 50 different groups come in here and they would all say ‘Oh, sure, that’s simple. We can get that done.’ And nobody could do it.”
One month later, ParkHub came back with a workable solution. When Baker had founded ParkHub four years previously, he’d envisioned a consumer-facing platform. To integrate with Ticketmaster, though, he realized he needed to ditch that and pivot to a B to B model. That decision would not only secure a deal with the American Airlines Center, but turn ParkHub into a third-party provider that could potentially serve the entire system of Ticketmaster venues.
Before ParkHub, Baker had worked in the parking industry for 17 years. He’d run nearby parking assets that ranged from those at Dallas Fort Worth Airport to SMU Athletics and Texas Motor Speedway. He also describes himself as a big Dirk Nowitzki fan and has been attending Mavericks game since long before the American Airlines Center opened in 2001. “I understood the pains associated with both sides of that two-sided market, seeing the operational friction and the frustration, and the consumer, partner, fan frictions, and frustrations,” he said.
Courson saw ParkHub—and parking in general—as part of a bigger consumer play. He sees customer service as central to his overall business, noting that “the first thing that everybody sees is pulling into a parking lot.”
“I want them to be happy when they come through the doors. And if you sat in a queue line for 35 minutes trying to get into a garage or a parking lot, you’ve already got a chip on your shoulder.”
The two biggest problems Courson had with parking in 2014 were the reliance on cash and the general lack of data on that side of the stadium’s operation. Using credit cards or other electronic payment options promised to speed up the parking process for customers and decrease the risk of theft. “The less cash you’re handling, the less chance somebody is going to be taking your cash,” Courson said.
Accepting electronic payments also ensured data was collected on every paying parking customer, helping ParkHub and its clients learn more about the habits of consumers. That data could help venues not just allocate parking resources to maximize occupancy and to alleviate congestion during peak arrival or departure times, but also feed into overall operations like sales, merchandise, and concessions.
ParkHub launched Prime, a mobile point-of-sale platform, with the American Airlines Center in June 2014, and Portal, a business intelligence system the following January. ParkHub has also added integrations to other ticketing platforms besides Ticketmaster, including Tickets.com and SeatGeek. In 2015, Billboard named the American Airlines Center as one of the world’s top-grossing concert venues. That same year the stadium registered 25,000 transactions through ParkHub, its total parking revenue grew by 48 percent, and its revenue per transaction grew by 73 percent.
The company’s client list quickly expanded, adding several arenas including the Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium and the San Francisco 49ers’ Levi’s Stadium. In February 2016, ParkHub powered the parking operations at Super Bowl 50, and it has done the same for all three Super Bowls since then. Data collected at each venue has helped support services for both existing and new clients.
“My particular data set, I am able to output to you what a fan looks like in a particular venue,” Baker said. “I can tell you what a fan looks like across a market and compare that to another market. What does a sports fan look like in arrival patterns in Dallas versus San Francisco. Or what does the NFL fan across my platform look like.”
Courson believes the American Airlines Center hasn’t yet fully explored the data ParkHub has already collected there. But he now has four years’ worth of information stored away, and is excited for where ParkHub can take his venue in the future. “I’ve never looked at them as a parking company,” he said. “These guys are absolutely a tech company.”
All images courtesy of ParkHub.