ParkAround: The Innovative Solution To The Problem Of Parking In Athens

It’s a nightmare… for drivers in many areas. Finding parking in Athens is a difficult feat. However, things can become are lot easier with ParkAround. An innovative Greek Startup that gives you real time information about the availability and prices of car parks in the area you’re interested in. In fact, if you book a spot through ParkAround, you get major discounts. One of it’s Co-Founders, John Katsiotis, speaks to HuffPost Greece.

Finding parking is one of the biggest problems for drivers in Athens. How does your innovative app solve this issue?
Through ParkAround, drivers are able to book a parking spot in the nearest and cheapest car park in the area they want and to have total control of the price because they know beforehand the exact amount, which in many cases is reduced up to 80% through our exclusive discounts. In fact, 30% percent of traffic in the city is caused by drivers looking for parking. With ParkAround, drivers know in advance where they are going to park which means that they save valuable time for themselves but also for the other drivers moving around in the city.

ParkAround is available for web users as well as for iPhone and Android Smartphones. The driver fills in the address or the place (eg. restaurant, cinema etc) he would like to park and the app displays all the available car parks with information such as cost, distance, opening hours etc. Finally, the driver is able make a booking through the app and therefore guarantees exclusive discounts as well as a parking spot. ParkAround then informs the car park immediately so that when the driver arrives at the car park there’s a spot waiting for him!

Based on the information you have, do you think that the price of parking in the capital is high or low? And with that I mean, the initial pricing, independent of the discounts that you offer. I ask this because a lot of drivers think that the cost is quite high, especially for daily use.

The cost of parking is directly correlated with the area. What this means is that, in areas such as Syntagma and Kolonaki parking costs around15 euros for 3 hours and in areas such as Omonoia you can park with 10 euros for the whole day. Of course through ParkAround, drivers can park with one 1 euro per hour in Omonoia, 2 euros for 3 hours at Chalandri and 5 euros at Syntagma.

As time goes by, the ecosystem of startups gets bigger which makes funding more attainable.

If I’m not mistaken, ParkAround has expanded to London. What differences have you noticed between Athens and London in terms of developing your startup?

One difference is that drivers in London book parking hours or even days before, while in Athens most of the bookings happen just a few minutes prior. In addition, the phenomenon of illegal parking is not present in London.

As you’ve stated in previous interviews, you intend on expanding to other European cities. What are your immediate plans in terms of your global expansion?

For the time being, we are focusing on the Athens market seeing that we recently launched a new service for parking at the airport and at Piraeus port and there are still more opportunities for expansion in the Attiki area and the rest of Greece. More specifically, in just a few months the new service for parking at the airport has been met favourably by drivers - especially as the Christmas holidays approach - as it offers parking at much cheaper rates than taxis and sometimes even public transport.

The biggest challenge that we have faced is trying to educate the parking market on new technologies. ParκAround is a purely technological solution as it gives car parks a platform for smartly billing their customers. Nothing similar has happened before and therefore it has taken us a bit more time to educate the car parks on the advantages of using our service.

In Athens, we have 20.000 drivers that have downloaded ParkAround and we serve hundreds of drivers everyday through 90+ affiliated car parks.

To learn more about ParkAround, please visit their website HERE.


This is a translation of the article originally published on HuffingtonPost.gr
By: Yiannis Belegrinis