LOCAL AUTHORITY FOCUS HOLIDAY DESTINATIONS
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Ensuring Brighton rocks T
BRIGHTON ATTRACTS THOUSANDS OF VISITORS EVERY YEAR. BUT MAKING SURE THEIR EXPERIENCE BEGINS AND ENDS WELL SHOULD BE A JOINT EFFORT, ARGUES AUSTEN HUNTER
o be perfectly honest, I’ve always felt a little bit uncomfortable about the idea of ‘the parking industry’. Apart from making us a candidate for the obscure guest publication on Have I Got News
For You, it seems to suggest that parking has an independent life of its own. Clearly parking is not an end in itself. But how can we do more to genuinely integrate parking with the end-to-end travel and destinations experience? At the end of 2009 Brighton and Hove City
Council published a survey, which asked visitors to the city what they thought about their experience. T e survey looked at a variety of factors, which
together make up the visitor experience. T ings that scored really well were: a feeling of welcome; easy access; rail; good shopping; visitor information centre; nightlife/evening entertainment; and eating and drinking.
First impression Among the lowest-scoring factors were ease of parking and value for money of parking. To compound the issue, parking inevitably features at the beginning and end of the overall visitor experience, helping to create those all-important fi rst and last impressions. T e price of parking in Brighton and Hove can vary radically. Certain car parks in the city centre charge up to three to four times more than other car parks, sometimes within 200 metres, for the same time period. Around the same time as the visitor survey,
Brighton and Hove was beginning to examine two distinct dimensions to the authority’s
overall reputation: ● Association between individual services and
the authority; and ● Satisfaction with services. Parking came out with high association and low satisfaction, which means – rightly or wrongly – that parking could play a very signifi cant role in people’s perceptions of the authority as a whole. Coincidentally, during the same period, the council began
10 MARCH 2011
work on a project to modernise one of Brighton’s principal city-centre car parks. T e site is very close to T e Lanes, at the heart of the cultural and specialist retail quarter, directly beneath Brighton Town Hall, a stone’s throw from Brighton Pier, the Royal Pavilion, restaurants, theatres, hotels, clubs and bars. Occupancy fi gures showed that usage had been dropping every year for fi ve years, despite tariff s being frozen for 10 years.
Parking in a healthy state As far as customers are concerned there isn’t really a clear separation between destinations, travel and parking. A common question is: ‘How was your trip?’ But rarely ‘How was the parking?’ Quite often, there’s no perceived diff erence
between private and public parking. All parking is often seen as the responsibility of the city, which generally means (mistakenly) the local authority. Good-quality parking is probably more of a ‘hygiene factor’ in the overall customer experience. T ere is a greater need to avoid dissatisfaction than gain positive satisfaction. Nonetheless, the standards needed to avoid dissatisfaction are getting higher. To understand more about end-user needs, T e
A COMMON QUESTION IS: ‘HOW WAS YOUR TRIP?’ BUT RARELY ‘HOW WAS THE PARKING?
Lanes car park project team consulted with the local tourism offi ce, local businesses, the Federation of Disabled People and the Police and Fire Service as part of the design process. T at feedback helped to justify the business case for funding. T is year, the car park is receiving positive
customer feedback, 20 per cent more usage and signifi cantly higher income, despite a tariff adjustment and the recession. T e challenge now is to fi nd new ways of understanding what our customers want, and how we can do more to eff ectively collaborate with delivery partners. T e objectives are
threefold: ● Engaging in constructive two-way dialogue on a day-to-day basis with customers and delivery partners to fi nd
innovative solutions, break down misconceptions
and build reputation; ● Adding value to services by meeting evidenced
customer needs; and ● Developing a more coherent approach to integrate destinations, travel and both public and private parking. Inevitably, this means a greater emphasis on
communications. For Brighton and Hove, the parking annual report has been an excellent
www.britishparking.co.uk
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