Lisbon International Airport and Colombo shopping mall host the car parks with the highest traffic, regardless one consider volume or daily rotation. Both of them are driven by high customer levels of services and share a common aspiration – to lower the costs of park operation and minimise traffic jams or queuing near the park access lanes.

A-to-Be was invited to implement, in both of them, its award winning A-to-Be Parking™ solution, together with Via Verde’s clearing house. As a natural consequence, in 2005 EPA (European Parking Association) awarded our client, Empark, and A-to-Be solution the «Best Specialist Parking Product in Car parks».

The volume of traffic involved in both cases is a challenge by itself – over thirty entries and exit lanes and 3.5 million average customers per year in Colombo and a total of 1.5 million in all three parks of ANA’s Lisbon International Airport.

As an additional challenge, the distance between all three separate parking lots at the Airport was also demanding from a technical perspective. In this case, A-to-Be found a 3rd party park management system from ZEAG in place, which should be fully integrated – enters A-to-Be LinkBeyond™. All of these should be implemented without disrupting the intense 24×7 vehicle movement and at no time service was interrupted.

Both solutions were developed guaranteeing reliability and availability, with redundancy elements for increased service continuity. In Colombo’s implementation our solution handles over 2 million transactions per year, managing 10 entries and 15 exit lanes. As for the International Airport solution three independent systems were made available for assuring a reliable solution, keeping maintenance and operation simpler.

«This solution improved dramatically the operations’ performance and reduced coin and live money handling to almost nothing.» Vitor Mendes (Empark).

Since 2005 and 2008 both implementations are working smoothly and customer’s satisfaction is expressed in the growing annual figures. On the first month only, 35% of users preferred our automatic system and today this number exceeds an astounding 50%.