You have college football at the Georgia Dome, the Braves and Marlins at the Ted, DragonCon at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta and tons of other events that will draw thousands of vehicles competing for parking spaces around Atlanta this weekend.
Parking Panda, an online parking reservation service that expanded to Atlanta earlier this year, may be an option if you want to get ahead of the competition.
The company's website, parkingpanda.com, and app allow patrons to find, reserve and pay for guaranteed parking spaces in real time with payment via credit card. It's similar to Expedia for travel reservations.
Parking Panda has at least 4,000 parking spaces available for reservation at about 20 locations in downtown Atlanta and Midtown, according to spokesman Bryan Lozano. The Baltimore-based company, which gets a commission for each space reserved, has deals pending with five additional Atlanta garages and parking lots.
“We’ve created a platform to make it easy to find parking, and it drives traffic to our partners,” Lozano said Friday
The Atlanta section of the website provides a list of venues, points of interest, hotels, neighborhoods, restaurants, monthly parking lots and garage spaces that can be reserved. There is also a calendar of events that you can click on to find parking. Some the options, however, can be at least a mile or two away.
For example, if you wanted to reserve a parking space for the Alabama vs West Virginia football game Saturday during the Chick-fil-A Kickoff at the Georgia Dome, the website around noon Friday showed reservations were available for parking spaces as far away as 2 miles and as close as 0.2 miles. The cost was from $5 to $41, with higher costs closest to the Dome.
The company is establishing partnerships with sponsors of sporting and entertainment events. It has signed a partnership with the Atlanta Falcons, Baltimore Ravens and St. Louis Rams, whose websites will link to Parking Panda’s.
The company was founded in Baltimore in 2011 by Nick Miller and Adam Zilberbaum and now has grown to more than 40 cities nationwide, including Atlanta.
Nationally, Parking Panda says it has access to more than 2 million parking spaces at 12,000 locations.
About the Author
