Standsted Airport new parking

obeywan_kenobe

I traveled to Ireland today on a business trip. It was a quick one day trip.
I went by Ryanair via Standsted Airport.
If anyone uses that airport they may not know that they have slightly changed their short term car parks.


I was only going for a day so I decided to park in the short term car park. I was in a hurry because the M25 was crap and it was fairly early in the morning so it was fairly dark. The short term car park comprises of lots of little car parks each with its own barrier and a sign to say if there are spaces or not. I parked in the first one that said spaces.
Unfortunately this was not your normal short term car park. This was a 15min car park!!!???! Therefore if you stay longer than 15min then the cost dramatically increases.

I dont know about you but i think this is a total rip off. It doesnt provide a service because who goes to an airport for 15min. if someone is under pressure to get their flight they are more than likely to accidentally use this car park and BAA are quids in.
It is getting someone into a comfort zone where they are not 100% concentrating on whats around them and then hitting them with a new situation which cost lots of money.

I admit the car park was sign posted but when you are travelling to an airport you make 3 decisions about parking: Long stay, medium or short?
Whats next special aisles in the car park denoting the exact number of days you are away. Why do we have to comlicate things?!!!!!!!!!

rogue_element

How much did it cost you in the end?

obeywan_kenobe

£30 when it should have cost £11.00

gregdedman

Stansted and BAA have been very sneaky about this.

There used to be a '15 minute free' car park which was perfect for picking up and dropping off people, allowing you to see them off and meet them at arrivals, as mentioned this has been turned into a pay car park,

prices are;
0-30 mins £1.50
30-1hour £2.80
1-2 hours £5
2-3 hours £6.70

If you use the free 15 minute drop off in front of the terminal you run the risk of getting a ticket or a tow if vehicle is unattended.

What used to be free now costs minimum of £1.50, in a purely money making move.

HOWEVER, in true 'consumer revenge', moneysaving style, heres a secret freebie from me!

As you approach the final roundabout before the terminal, take the fourth exit, after the turn for short stay 'rip off' car parks, what looks like a service road is actually a short link road onto Parsonage Road, a country lane running exactly adjacent to the short stay car parks (a 5 second walk away!). 30 yards up this road is a big layby that you can park in, for FREE, for any length of time.
Ideal for when a flight is delayed and you need to wait for arrivals.

Heres the link to a map of the airport, you can see the roundabout and road marked in yellow right before the terminal building.

http://uk.multimap.com/map/browse.cgi?client=public&X=555500&Y=223000&width=700&height=400&gride=&gridn=&srec=0&coordsys=gb&db=&addr1=&addr2=&addr3=&pc=&advanced=&local=&localinfosel=&kw=&inmap=&table=&ovtype=&keepicon=&zm=0&scale=10000&up.x=297&up.y=5

Hope this helps people and saves you all some money.....

CONSUMER REVENGE!!!!! HORRRRAH!:T

alared

Stansted have ALWAYS been a complete rip-off for parking,mainly because there is no competition.

The best thing to do, even if only for one day, is to use the long stay,where they will only rip you off for £7-80 a day.

peterbaker

I am sick of the new millennium greed of companies I once respected.

I am half a century old. I expect better than NCP/BAA's recent modus operandi.

Don't avoid confrontation with these people. Stand up to them. Surprise them. Implement CONSUMER REVENGE tactics.

I have been a very regular visitor and user of Stansted for over 5 years. I have known the airport intimately for 20 years, and quite well for all my life.

This evening I saw friends off at the airport. "Let's have a coffee before we say goodbye." "OK Good idea, I'll go park the car in zone D where I normally do when I meet you at the pickup area, and see you in 10 minutes." (I must have parked there twenty or thirty times this century and seen the charges creep up .... then today's experience ...

Just over an hour after I park, I put my ticket in the machine to pay. £20 please.

Ehm No actually. Because I have been conned. I press cancel and return to my car and get in.

I drive to the barrier and Press to Talk. I offer to pay the reasonable normal charge. They refuse. They tell me I will not leave unless I pay. I tell them I will let myself out. They seem to think I can't or I am kidding. I again offer to pay the normal reasonable charge. They again refuse, and whilst they watch me on their camera (I invited them to do so), they invite the police to speak with me.

The police eventually let me into their confidence and imply that they have been called out rather a lot by the car park to tackle evaders or malcontents ever since the new charges regime was imposed. They imply that they were told I was evading the charge. I advised them that I was not evading anything and had had my reasonable offer refused so I'd let myself out, without causing any damage, and had again offered to vist their office to pay a normal reasonable fee before I left. All this with a police officer sitting in their office for some reason watching the BAA/NCP Short Stay camera with them(??).

I have long wondered about the wisdom of full blown police constables employed on parking restriction enforcement duties at Stansted, which is hardly a highway duty, but is more like 'leisure event management'.

Anyway, the two officers who turned up in their fast car to speak with me on the scene, and who after a fashion accepted my story, agreed it was a civil matter rather than the type that involved their first notion (a trip to their station), so took a few routine details, exchanged pleasantries with me and let me leave.

And so it is on the question of me choosing to escape from the airport car park without incurring the menace of being denied my freedom if I failed to pay their demanded outrageous new fee (a civil matter with a difference ... one with a company tricking me with a considerably less than civil charging regime).

However, I am old enough in the tooth to stand up and say that corporate greed on this scale IS a confidence trick by people who should know better, and so I also say that there must be a few rogue directors at BAA/NCP who have been either criminally insane enough to have imposed this change, or who are your actual pure robbers, plain and simple.

For marketeers amongst you, who don't like talk of confidence tricks, you can consider it a form 'bait and switch' if you like. Either way, it's wrong.

BAA is now a national bad-taste joke for all to see, and NCP is not the company it was in the days when as a young man I shook the hands of some of its directors when they used to accept invitations to our office for an annual luncheon.

Anyway, not wishing to allow the latest guises of BAA/NCP the initiative to act next, I drove round the corner and negotiated with another landowner to park my car for free for an hour. I then walked down to the "Short Stay Customer Service office" and paid what I thought was reasonable (£5 because thats what I would have paid had I realised their new zone D trick before I left my car there happily for an hour and a bit). They issued me with an acknowledgement of the £5 and a piece of paper which might effectively have started life as an excess charge notice for the balance of £15 before I converted it into a complaint form. The Customer Service refusnik, an ok lad just (sadly) doing and saying what he'd been told with his best attempt at a poker face, said he'd better read my alterations because it was supposed to be a standard form. I said yes, I bet it was, which is why I changed it into something else entirely before I signed it and got him to fill in his bit, and yes he'd better read it all.

I am told that as part of the 'normal' annual charges review at Stansted, the £20 charge they seek to collect from me for parking in excess of 1 hour this evening in the old zone D is actually being raised to £25 very shortly. I guess that the charges for longer stays that previous posters mentioned will increase even further.

There will be nice new signs up shortly announcing the fact if anyone would like to look for them and inwardly digest the contents.

Yes. Quite,....

.... and little doubt there will be corresponding new standard forms too perhaps. Watch out for those. Change words like "I acknowledge that I owe..." to "I dispute that I owe..." and counter comments like "Customer says he would not pay our fee!" to "Customer offered and paid a reasonable normal fee of £5 and says our new charging regime is a confidence trick".

I suspect I shall have to find and use the CEO's telephone numbers at both BAA and NCP before I see the last of this but the ensuing inconvenience they suffer will be nothing less than they deserve:-)

Robiko

I also made the same mistake yesterday, I parked in what I thought was the short term carpark, misunderstanding the charges (I thought is was £1:50 for the first 15 mins, and then the normal parking tariff after that, how wrong I was...). I parked in the centre of the carpark, away from the terminal and away from any red '15min' signs. Went to the airport, had coffee with my friend before she left, returned to the carpark to pay the charge only to find the charge for 3 hours parking = £25, a massive difference from the £6:80 I was expecting...I complained to their office, to no avail "There's enough signs mate" and now I am going to complain to both NCP and BAA, not only with photos to show how crap the signage is and how easily it can be misunderstood, but also with timings to show it's almost impossible to do anything within 15mins if you have a family, luggage and you're parked in the furthest '15mins' space from the terminal (unless NCP/BAA expect us to be purely ignorant and drop and go...) which makes absolute nonsense of their parking policies and charges...

I welcome any comments...

JohnPHammond

Hi.

Have you had any other feedback - last night my group picking me up unfortunately repeated your experience, and costing me £25!

I was absolutely fuming!!

All this does is encourage people to find congestion causing ways around this system.

shoey79

I was in stansted a few weeks ago with some friends, we just wanted to stop for a short while and watch some planes take off (boredom), but when i pulled upto one of the Barriers, it was £2.70 for 15mins!!!

I reversed out right away!

its a disgrace!

so2006

gregdedman i love your post very helpful! thanks for the tips!

markchap

You can also park outside 'enterprise house' FREE for 30mins, just park up and walk up over the bridge that crosses the railway. You'll then be right outside the terminal

http://www.multimap.com/maps/?&t=l&map=51.8838852320175,0.257948566495479|16|4&loc=GB:51.8838852320175:0.257948566495479:16#t=l&map=51.88788,0.25896|18|8&loc=:51.88791:0.25886:18||

Sorry for the long link.