Shopping center parking and customers' freedom of choice

Driving powers everyday life at shopping centers

Finland's shopping centers are visited an estimated 450 million times a year (Finnish Council of Shopping Centers: Finnish Shopping Centers 2025). Even conservatively, an estimated 15–20% of these visits are made by car. That translates to roughly 50–100 million car visits a year. In other words, every day hundreds of thousands of cars drive in and out of Finland's shopping centers to run everyday errands — shopping, the doctor, the movies, a restaurant, park-and-ride, and back home.

Parking exists for one purpose. It serves the driver's journey to their actual destination. Parking itself is not the point. When was the last time you heard someone say they were going to a parking facility for fun?

When the volumes are this large and parking is just one stop along the way, it should be as smooth and unobtrusive as possible.

The technology for smooth parking already exists

That's exactly why, back in the early 2000s, license-plate-recognition-based parking technology started being adopted. When a car is recognized by camera, parking is logged automatically and the driver doesn't need to do anything.

This has been complemented by mobile parking, which has made parking even easier. In Finland, the apps with by far the largest user bases, EasyPark and ParkMan, both offer a feature where parking starts and stops automatically via license-plate recognition.

In practice, a driver can keep their phone in their pocket, drive in, run their errand, and drive out. Payment is charged automatically through the app.

Extremely convenient. And according to research, this is exactly the parking method drivers like best and that produces the most satisfaction.

But then reality hits. Unfortunately, tens of millions of car-driving shopping-center visitors don't get to enjoy this convenience the way they expect to.

Take an example:

You drive into a shopping center whose entrance says automatic camera parking is in use. Inside the garage you see EasyPark and ParkMan signs. You're pleased that your familiar app works here too. You drive in, go to the movies, have dinner with friends, and head home satisfied. A week later, a parking invoice lands in your mailbox. It comes with a €5 billing surcharge.

What actually happened?

The unpleasant truth

In reality, only a small number of shopping centers have automatic camera parking that's genuinely automatic for everyone. Most often it only works with the app belonging to the company operating the parking. If you want parking to start and stop automatically and be sure the payment goes through correctly, you have to download that specific app.

Even if you already use EasyPark or ParkMan, you can't use automatic parking at that site with them, and the reason is surprisingly simple. A fully open model, where the driver is free to choose their payment method, doesn't serve the operators' business interests.

But hold on. Shouldn't parking serve the property and its users, not the other way around?

It should. Absolutely.

An important, major issue

Paying for parking has rapidly moved to mobile, just like other everyday services. In many shopping centers, up to 75% of parking is already paid via mobile, and the share keeps growing.

New apps and services offering an ever better driver experience keep entering the market. This only accelerates the shift.

Consumers want to decide for themselves which service they pay with, which is an entirely reasonable demand. Imagine a situation where, at a grocery store, you could only pay with the store's own app. That would be annoying.

In this sense, the parking industry has, when it comes to payments, trapped itself. A closed model blocks new innovations from entering the market, even though they could improve both the property's business and the driver's experience.

The solution: an open model

The solution is, in the end, quite simple.

As a property owner or manager, it pays to demand an operating solution and a technical platform that treats all payment methods equally and delivers their benefits to drivers without restrictions.

One of our customers was once asked why their shopping center gets so few parking-related contacts from both drivers and tenants. The answer was simple:

“Parking just works so seamlessly.”

Seamless parking isn't a matter of opinion. It's one of the most important foundations of the entire visitor experience. And the driver's freedom of choice is the key to it.