Las Vegas Steps Up PassportParking System
Parking is easily one of the best uses for a mobile payments system there is. You’re already mobile, so being able to pay for a parking space directly from your car is a perfect application of the concept. That and people doubtless love being able to pay from their car when it’s raining or the weather’s otherwise unpleasant; it’s kind of like paying for gas from your car. Less time spent outside in that case. Las Vegas, meanwhile, is taking advantage of this and stepping up its PassportParking system to give more users more access.
Now, with the modified PassportParking system, it’s available to both on-street and off-street spaces all over the city. When Passport brought the system to the city two years ago, it was mostly only a matter of surface lots. Now it’s available in a much larger number of spaces. PassportParking itself is free to download from either the iOS App Store or Google Play, which covers most commonly-used devices. Users can not only monitor a parking session, but also pay for more time remotely and get receipts by email.
City of Las Vegas parking services manager Brandy Stanley commented “We’re aiming to digitize the parking experience. Providing the city with alternative parking payment options adds a modern approach to an otherwise traditional process. As a tourist city, we want to make the parking process as simple as possible, and we are able to accomplish that with Passport.”
Which makes absolute sense when you think about it; Las Vegas pretty much depends on tourism. Back in 2010, the Las Vegas Sun suggested that Las Vegas may be “…the most tourism-dependent economy in the United States.” A city so dependent on the tourist trade has to make its operations as amenable to tourism as possible. That not only includes air travel, but car travel as well, and car travel depends on decent parking spaces.
Thus a move like this improves Vegas’ overall marketability as a car-friendly tourist spot and keeps the trade coming back. By making it easier to pay for parking with PassportParking—hopefully easier-to-find parking is forthcoming too—the experience improves and the end result should be more tourism.