Announcements

It’s my great pleasure to announce that Yona Shtern has officially joined ParkWhiz as CEO and I’ve moved to Chairman.

Since founding ParkWhiz over ten years ago, it has been my vision to make it easier for people to move about. In bringing that vision to life, we have put smiles on millions of drivers’ faces. From scratch we took an idea, mixed in unrelenting passion and determination, and built something people love. The key ingredient, though, has been the amazingly talented people I have the privilege of working alongside. They have taught and inspired me all along the journey toward making ParkWhiz what it is today, and it has been the greatest joy for me to come to work with them every day. To our customers, strategic partners, investors and employees, I thank you for your support as we continue to iterate and improve.

While our vision has come to life, the journey is not complete. Mobility is rapidly changing, and with connected and autonomous vehicles soon to hit the road, ParkWhiz is just hitting its stride.

The Board and I spent a great deal of time searching for the right person to help lead ParkWhiz to the next level. Yona is an experienced leader who believes in what we’ve built, but also recognizes how vast our opportunity is for growth. ParkWhiz has been fortunate to have him on our board, and we’re even more fortunate to have him in the driver’s seat.

As Chairman, I’ll continue to be very active, working on shaping our vision and longer term strategic opportunities. I’m thrilled to be working with Yona, our COO Dan Roarty, and the rest of our world-class team as we continue to build a great company that will help shape the transportation ecosystem.

UPDATE NOW

 Express Parking

Your parking pass is ready instantly so you can park and do your thing faster.

Today I’m thrilled to officially welcome Dan Roarty to the ParkWhiz team. Dan joins us to lead our efforts as President of Consumer Brands and Marketplace. We’re on a mission to make parking a seamless experience for every driver, everywhere. At the same time, we’re committed to providing real, sustainable value to our network of operators. With Dan on board, we’re better positioned today than ever before to deliver on these fronts.

Dan’s insight into fast-scaling marketplace businesses and proven record of growing consumer brands lets us take advantage of the considerable momentum we’re experiencing now. During his time leading Groupon’s marketplaces and in the leadership team at Orbitz, Dan’s shown tremendous strength in helping fast-growing companies scale. His experience and energy add a lot to the team as we’re on the cusp of enormous growth.

As Dan takes the helm of our consumer efforts, Tim Brennan transitions into the role of President of Platform. Tim was instrumental in launching our platform efforts when we kicked off this project nearly two years ago, including running point on major partnerships with Ford and other collaborators in the automotive space. He’s been a strong internal champion of this vision since. The platform division includes our R&D teams and works closely alongside automotive and software partners to build for the dashboards of smarter vehicles. This division also focuses on supporting our API partners to assure that the ParkWhiz experience remains frictionless – wherever the end-user experiences it.

We think about parking so much today so that no one will need to think about it tomorrow. Whether ParkWhiz is used on a smartphone or within the dashboard of a car, we want everything about parking – booking, payment, entry – to run in the background of drivers’ lives. Focusing dually on consumer and platform will get us there – and with Dan and Tim leading the charge on both fronts, we’ll get there sooner.

The past year has marked incredible momentum for us. Our acquisition of Best Parking positioned us as the most popular parking service in New York City and helped expand our network of locations to 12,000 across the U.S. – with more than a third of those bookable on demand. Our team has grown to 140 of the most talented people working within Chicago and beyond. We also hired Todd Tucker to run our sales and market development efforts. Todd’s considerable experience as a leader within the parking industry helped us build the infrastructure to provide real and sustainable value to the operators in our marketplace. In addition, we’ve signed on even more partners ranging from companies in the automotive space to major consumer brands like Ticketmaster. In short, the last year has been the busiest one yet for ParkWhiz.

When I remember where we began ten years ago, before smartphones, certainly before smart cars, it’s crazy to think of how far we’ve already come. We’ve parked more than 6 million cars – helping save countless moments of people’s lives from the frustrations of looking for a space (and saving them a lot of money at the same time). That’s an achievement that I’m very proud of – and it’s only the start.

Pre-tax. It’s like music to your ears, isn’t it? Pre-tax benefit cards and flexible spending accounts may be in our top 5 favorite ways to save money.

By using a pre-tax benefits card or flexible spending card, you can save up to 40%. That’s “free money”, since it isn’t taxed. When you couple that with saving up to 50% by parking with ParkWhiz, you’re talking about saving 90%. That’s a lot of percent.

The best part? It’s incredibly easy to get started. Just use your commuter benefits card to book your next parking space with ParkWhiz. You can add a new card on your account page or at checkout.

You’ll be parking like a rockstar in no time.

When we launched ParkWhiz, we wanted to put the power of choosing price and location back in the hands of the consumer. Happy to say, we’ve brought cost savings, convenience and on-the-go booking to the old-school, manual paper ticket world of parking.

It’s been our job to help millions of customers since–listening to their stories, hearing their concerns– to enhance our product and their experience parking.  What we didn’t anticipate was just how many drivers were using ParkWhiz for needs related to their office or business.

“Well over 40% of our most loyal repeat customers use our existing consumer app for business-related parking,” said Aashish Dalal, ParkWhiz founder and CEO. “We saw the opportunity to develop a product to reduce employee parking costs, simplify account management and receipts, and re-invent the process for visitor parking for businesses,” he said.

Hatching a strong strategy

The more we delved into the habits of businesses when it came to T&E expenses, the more we discovered another old-fashioned system that needed to go mobile.

In fact, 80% of the office managers surveyed* say travel and expense entry is still done manually, after-the-fact. ParkWhiz set out to solve the sheer waste of time, volume of paper receipts, diminished productivity and poor real-time tracking.

“We’d already built a full-function consumer solution, with the bonus of saving up to 50% on drive-up rates,” said Dalal. “Our next challenge was to tailor that experience to employee and client needs in business.”

Product trials, stellar feedback

ParkWhiz for Business was created as a seamless system for both employee travel and client visits. By leveraging our mobile platform, we are able to bring together the smooth user-friendly capabilities of a parking app with a back-end tracking system that makes processing expenses a breeze for businesses.
The ultimate result is a solution that not only enables employees to book parking–at the best prices–but also allows businesses to create mobile parking passes for their clients. For small to medium-sized companies, this means time, productivity and cost savings.

“In the past, employees had to file expense reports for parking and accounting had to chase down missing receipts and client information,” said Switchfast CEO, Jim Anderson, following product trials this year. With ParkWhiz for Business, these hassles are gone,” says Anderson. “ParkWhiz will drive significant savings for our business and our employees prefer to use it, so it’s a win-win for everyone.”

Smart phones, smart business

The key for the ParkWhiz parking passes, is, of course, smart phones. Employees and clients are now accustomed to booking services from anywhere–making our app (for ios and Android) an unmatched tool for convenience.

Individual employees place a booking at any time while traveling, for guaranteed parking at the best price on arrival. The purchase is then charged to the corporate account which allows businesses to track in real-time without paper receipts or the cost of alternate expense management systems.

For clients, ParkWhiz for Business offers concierge-style booking. With this new service, offices are able to book their visitors guaranteed parking in advance, and pay for part or all of it. The client gets an email with the virtual pass, clear directions and instructions. With a nod towards customer appreciation, it eliminates the stress and ill-will caused by making a customer search for parking.

The future of parking

“We’re poised to reinvent the parking experience,” expounds Dalal. “For too long, parking for employees and clients has been at best a flawed experience. It can be stressful and waste time.  We don’t have to accept that. By handling parking in advance with our mobile passes, they’ll have the benefit of a guaranteed space, at a lower rate, without the worry of finding parking or paper tracking.”

ParkWhiz for Business launches this week in Chicago and is targeted to roll out nationally in 2017, bringing the ease of parking for meetings to urban centers across the country.

About ParkWhiz:

Headquartered in Chicago, ParkWhiz is the nation’s largest on-demand parking app. The company’s website and mobile platforms provide a fast and efficient way for drivers to find and book guaranteed parking spaces before reaching their destination at over 5000 parking locations across the country, from New York City to Chicago to San Francisco. ParkWhiz is an official partner and parking provider for Ford, Concur, and TicketMaster among many others.  ParkWhiz has helped well over 2 million drivers seamlessly get where they need to be. For more information, visit ParkWhiz.com.
*Source: Google Analytics, average monthly unique users, Q1 2015/Forrester Consulting on behalf of Concur, February 2014