Guides · Honest answers
When you should not reserve parking at all
On a two day trip with somebody willing to drive you, this whole site is a solution to a problem you do not have.
A parking desk telling you not to reserve reads oddly, so here is the reasoning: we would rather have somebody who calls for ten years than a bay sold today to somebody who resented it.
When a lift wins
A two day trip, somebody at home who is going to be near the airport anyway, and a return at a civilised hour. Nothing on this site beats that, and it is not close.
The calculation changes when the favour is large: a five in the morning departure, a return at midnight, or a forty minute drive each way twice. At that point a fenced lot for four days costs thirty six dollars and buys back four trips across the Triangle for somebody who did not want to make them.
When a car service wins
Short trips from inside the Beltline where the ride costs less than the parking would.
For a two day trip that maths often works. For anything past four days it stops working sharply, because the ride is a fixed cost twice and parking is a small cost daily. Somewhere around three days the two lines cross, and past a week the ride is roughly three times the long stay lot.
When the airport's own parking wins
When you have left it to the morning of a peak week and the lots are full. Then it is the only option and the desk will tell you so rather than pretend it can conjure a space.
When a reserved bay genuinely wins
- 1. Trips of four days or more. The daily rate is small and the alternatives are not.
- 2. Early departures and late returns, where nobody wants to be your driver.
- 3. Any trip where the car needs to be somewhere anyway, because you are driving on afterwards.
- 4. Groups, where one car and one bay replaces several rides.
- 5. Peak weeks, where turning up hopeful genuinely fails.
That is most of the trips this desk actually books, which is why the list above is short and this page exists.
Why this page is on a parking site
Because the alternative is worse for us.
Somebody who reserves a bay for a trip that never needed one feels sold to, correctly, and does not come back. Give somebody the straight answer once and they come back the day a bay genuinely is the straight answer, which around here is most of the calendar.
When it is, the booking page takes about twenty seconds.