Filling the Hollywood Hotels’ Empty Parking Lots With SOFTRA In Europe

Hotel parking lots are usually overflowing with hotel guests, staff and vendors. However, something unbelievable happened over the last year and hotels are empty. The hospitality industry is suffering big losses during the pandemic all across the country and around the world.

With hotel occupancy rate dropping by 50%+ across the U.S. due to COVID-19, this hotel is driving new customers to… its parking lot.

A crisis of such scope is the right timing for new generation technologies to change the ways important and yet often underestimated assets, like parking spaces, are managed and utilized.

The Hollywood Hotel, a beautiful classic Hollywood hotel located at 1160 N. Vermont Ave, in Hollywood, California, did just that and partnered with a.Lot Parking, a provider of touchless parking technology solutions, to upgrade their parking lot. This proved to be a great decision to meet COVID-19 challenges.

First of all, the Hollywood Hotel wanted to minimize its parking management. a.Lot Parking team has installed a revenue management and touchless access control software re-using all existing parking control hardware such a barrier arms and gates, induction loops and traffic signals. Since a.Lot Parking technology is fully digital, cloud-based and touchless, it can be managed remotely at anytime from anywhere. This has eliminated a need for extra operational costs and enabled the hotel’s front-desk staff to manage all parking operations, from reservations, user permissions and revenue settings.

It turned out that “touchless” became a key word in 2020 helping the Hollywood Hotel not only to deliver the highest quality safety standards to its hotel and parking clients, but also to avoid extra resources making sure that the equipment is constantly cleaned and possible to use.

The next question was – how to bring more customers to the underutilized parking lot located in the middle of Hollywood, one of the busiest urban areas in Los Angeles? The biggest help came from a.Lot Parking seamless integration with SpotHero, the digital parking leader and only independent off-street parking marketplace in North America. Millions of drivers use SpotHero’s mobile apps and website to find, book and access off-street parking in over 7,000 locations across 300 cities in the U.S. and Canada. This feature has helped Hollywood Hotel to attract customers from surrounding businesses like medical facilities and municipal essential services offices. Seeing parking revenue rising during the times of red numbers showed the potential of digital solution from a.Lot Parking that enabled the parking sharing in expensive and usually very busy locations like Hollywood.

Kian Zarrinnam from The Hollywood Hotel, said a.Lot Parking provided solutions that fit the Hotel’s needs: “The Hollywood Hotel and a.Lot Parking became partners by listening to each other’s needs and ultimately fulfilling them now and into the future. At the end of the day it’s all about time, and a parking system must be simple with as little maintenance, effort and cost as possible. Time equates to money!”.

About SOFTRA 

SOFTRA is a leader in the development and installation of parking lot management systems based on license plate recognition (LPR) technology. Hundreds of our customers in Europe and the United States have enjoyed our systems since 2008. SOFTRA is known as a.Lot Parking in the United States.

About A.lot Parking

A.lot Parking Solutions specializes in touchless parking management and access control systems for commercial buildings, healthcare facilities and hospitality industries. A.lot cloud-based Parking Management Platform (PMP) use license plate recognition (LPR) for touchless access control and mobile app for touchless payments. The PMP offers comprehensive analytics platform and maximizes return on parking assets. A.lot Parking is known as SOFTRA in Europe.