But if parking is free then you’re subsidizing the car drivers every time you walk or bike to the place. Parking has a real cost and it makes sense to separate that cost from the separate transaction you’re making with the business. Otherwise you’re just externalizing the true parking cost. Products and services then get more expensive to pay for that and inefficiencies creep in raising costs more than the parking used to cost.
Living in Boston and railing against paid parking sounds like a very frustrating hobby.
By my math Mark is out of pocket $8, not to mention no compensation for the hassle and embarrassment. Maybe there is something in their T&C that they reserve the right to screw you over, but if that’s the case we’re lowering expectations a bit, no? Their agents’ language may have been pleasant but that doesn’t change the fact that the remedy was inadequate.
I haven’t personally had a problem with Spot Hero. Really the only time I use it is to park in downtown Chicago where the spot hero rates are usually ~33-50% less than any of the drive up garage fees.
Yep that is my experience as well in NYC. I go in and out of Brooklyn and Manhattan a lot - and take the train except when I need to haul stuff in one direction or another. Then I drive. And Spot Hero has been flawless for me - sometimes saving a lot, sometimes only a little, but never a hassle. I don’t have an opinion one way or the other about the company - maybe they are jerks, but my experience has been good.
And yeah I kind of agree with the comments that this level of back and forth with a company over a few bucks seems a bit over the top -but that is everyone’s personal decision. I have just had some real doozies with horrific customer service from companies that involved significant $ - I am sure all/most of us have - so I reserve my outrage energy for those.
Disclaimer: I am not a shill for SpotHero just a happy (for now) customer. You paid in advance to have a spot guaranteed (which they failed to provide) in a place that presumably doesn’t have adequate or cheap parking. My point is that parking in these sorts of places (Boston, Chicago loop, etc) is annoying and an app can’t completely remove that annoyance. Like Uber, Turo, and AirBnb, these methods for making otherwise underused things usable, have failure modes so I tend to use them when I am not in a time crunch. I rented a Chevy Bolt on Turo when we were in San Jose since we only needed the car for a subset of our stay. It took 30 minute to do the pick up and another 30 to do the drop off, because the car and the owner where not in the same spot (because of crazy parking rules and access). I had left enough buffer time that a missed communication wouldn’t impact the fun part of the trip. In this case, the prospect of having an electric car to try out was worth the added complication. I don’t expect this to be a time savings as much as provided access where there is none and giving the money to a fellow citizen instead of all of it to a corporation. So far Airbnb hasn’t left me without a place to stay…that will be interesting if that happens…
