Guides · Long stays
Parking for a fortnight or longer
Past about five days the arithmetic flips, and past two weeks it stops being close.
Short trips are about minutes. Long trips are about money, and about the state the car is in when you come back.
The money
At the published starting rates, a fourteen day stay comes out roughly like this:
- Long stay surface lot
- about $91
- Fenced surface lot
- about $126
- Covered deck
- about $182
- Valet drop
- about $294
Those are starting figures and the desk confirms the real one, but the shape does not change: the gap between the lowest and the highest is two hundred dollars, which is a different order of decision from the ten dollars it would have been on a four day trip.
The three checks before you leave the car
Fuel. Half a tank or better. A car returning to a cold lot with a nearly empty tank is a car with a condensation problem, and a fortnight is long enough for it to matter.
Battery. Two weeks is fine for a healthy battery and marginal for one that is four years old and has been slow to start. If yours has been hesitating, a fortnight in a lot is when it stops pretending.
Anything perishable or valuable. Obvious, routinely forgotten, and the reason a lot of people come back to a car that smells.
What a long stay does to the choice of lot
It removes the shuttle from the equation almost entirely. Eight extra minutes twice on a fourteen day trip is nothing against ninety dollars saved.
It raises the value of cover, but not enough to close the gap. A fortnight in July on open ground is unpleasant to return to; a fortnight on a deck costs ninety dollars more. Most people take the heat and open the windows.
Reservations beyond a month
Possible, quoted individually, and worth a telephone call rather than a form. Operators price monthly stays differently and the desk will get you the monthly figure rather than multiplying the daily one.
Beyond about six weeks most operators want to know it is coming, because a car that never moves occupies a bay they could turn over. Say so at the start and it is straightforward.
Send the dates on the booking page and the reply will include the arithmetic above for your actual window rather than a general table.