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How airport parking cowboys broke the speed limit and even stole our sweets
Loose change was stolen from all three cars we handed over to airport parking operators as part of an undercover Which? Travel investigation into rogue meet-and-greet providers.
Two of the cars were also caught speeding on six occasions during the short journey to and from the off-site car park. And a packet of sweets was even nicked from the glove box of one vehicle.
In the most shocking instance, Quick Park (an off-site service recommended by the comparison site Deals4Parking) drove our car at nearly 70mph in a 50mph zone.
It then left the vehicle in the back garden of an abandoned rectory and took nearly an hour and a half to return the car when we returned from our 'holiday'.
To top it off, we found that the loose change left in the central console, totalling £4.50 had been taken.
Avoid the cowboys. Find out the airport parking firms Which? recommends in our survey of the best airport parking operators.
Petty theft common with meet-and-greet parking
Airport meet-and-greet parking should offer the height of convenience. You drive up to the terminal, hand your keys to a professional and jet off on holiday safe in the knowledge that your car has been securely stored.
Many airports offer their own official meet-and-greet or valet service, but the off-site alternatives are considerably cheaper.
When we asked Which? readers if they’d had any problems with third-party meet and greet operators, we received hundreds of responses. Petty theft was common, but readers also told us they had missed flights or been forced to ride around in a taxi hunting for their car.
And there have been reports of more serious crime. Heathrow Police told us that they had received 300 allegations related to meet-and-greet services in the past two years, some of which involved the theft of the vehicle.
Last year, a fraudster operating at Manchester Airport was jailed for leaving hundreds of cars in a farmer’s field and on residential streets.
Meet-and-greet airport parking operators damaged my car
A shocking one in seven of the complaints we received about meet-and-greet parking involved damage to the car.
In January this year, Margaret Smith paid £172 to Kar Parking Heathrow to store her car for a month, but it was delivered to her at Heathrow with a smashed windscreen. It wasn’t just a chip. The car was undriveable. So Margaret, with her husband and toddler in tow, had no choice but to book into a hotel for the night and arrange for a full replacement worth £250.
The meet-and-greet driver from Kar Parking offered little sympathy. He told Margaret the company would take no responsibility and that the damage would be covered by her own insurance. She was told the same when she rang up to complain.
Kar Parking Heathrow ignored our requests for an explanation.
Many meet-and-greet airport parking providers are uninsured
The British Parking Association (BPA) told us that relatively few providers have appropriate insurance to operate a meet-and-greet service, and that most rogue traders are completely uninsured.
That’s why they’ll tell you to claim on your own insurance, which in reality is likely to be very difficult. One of the companies we road tested at Heathrow - Mayfair Parking - even states in its T&Cs that ‘while your vehicle is parked with us, you must rely on your own vehicle insurance policy’.
This lack of insurance is not ideal, given that we caught Mayfair speeding on four occasions during the 10-mile round trip from Terminal 5. Nor would anyone want their car left uninsured in some of the dodgy sites we tracked our vehicles to.
Our meet-and-greet car was left in a back garden
Quick Park’s website said that our car would be stored in a patrolled car park with CCTV and, crucially, ParkMark accreditation. This means that the site should have passed a police risk assessment. In reality, our GPS tracker found it left in the back garden of a rectory, five miles from Heathrow. The BPA confirmed this was not a registered ParkMark site.
Off-site provider Gatwick Airport Parking Spaces Ltd (which has nothing to do with official Gatwick Airport parking) promised a fenced and gated car park when we booked online. Instead, our vehicle was taken to a patch of industrial wasteland behind a petrol station before being returned to us caked in mud - both inside and out.
Mayfair Parking was the only service that did take our car to a ParkMark accredited site with CCTV, as promised on its website. Nevertheless, when we visited we were able to drive straight in and wander around unchecked. The gates didn’t look like they’d ever closed, and the car park was at the end of a dirt track with rubbish piled up at the sides.
Quick Park, Mayfair Parking and Gatwick Airport Parking Spaces all failed to respond to our request for comment.
The BPA told us it ‘takes all allegations of lower-than-expected standards extremely seriously’ and immediately reviewed the site. However it told us that both the BPA and Met police were satisfied that the site remains secure for the ParkMark standard.
Airport parking cowboys appear high up in Google searches
For consumers looking for what firm to park with at airports, it is very easy to be convinced by these cowboy companies. They are often the most- prominent option when you search for airport car parking online. Two of the three companies we investigated appeared on the first page of Google when we searched for meet-and-greet services.
Companies choose intentionally generic names (such as Quick Park) making it harder to find relevant reviews, or names that sound similar to the official airport scheme (like Gatwick Airport Parking Spaces), to confuse customers. They also operate under multiple monikers, and as soon as one name attracts bad reviews, they drop it.
Google told us: 'Protecting users is our top priority and we have strict ads policies that govern the types of ads and advertisers we allow on our platforms. We enforce our policies vigorously, and the ads flagged to us have been removed and the accounts suspended.’
Choose airport parking comparison sites carefully
All three providers also appeared on comparison websites. But these comparison sites are part of the problem. While well-known sites such as Holiday Extras offer a useful and legitimate service with big-name providers, many others provide a platform for rogues.
In some cases the comparison site and parking provider could be one and the same. When we searched for Heathrow parking with the Deals4Parking comparison site, it gave us seven providers to choose from. Suspiciously, all displayed the same customer rating: 4.9 out of five stars. But none appear to exist independently of Deals4Parking.
Just two of the options – Quick Park and Gregg Maurice are listed on Companies House. And both recently incorporated firms share a company director – the same director who resigned last year from Falcon Parking Ltd – the trading name of, you guessed it, Deals4Parking.
A rogue trader could hide behind a comparison site to absolve it of any responsibility when things go wrong. Deals4parking’s T&Cs state ‘Deals4parking offers the parking services as a reservation agent, hence all liabilities regarding the vehicles parking lie with the parking service operator’.
Deals4Parking/Quick Park did not respond to our request for comment.
How to choose the best airport parking
The BPA is in the process of setting up a new Approved Meet-and-Greet Operator scheme, which, by vetting operators, aims to stamp out rogues. But it’s yet to go live.
That’s where Which? comes in. As a result of concerns over airport parking services, we surveyed thousands of people about their parking experiences at UK airports, so that we can tell you the off-site parking operators you can trust.
They told us that some brands, like APH and I love Meet and Greet provide excellent meet-and-greet services.
