Redefining the airport experience: How to build and operate modern parking and landside mobility platforms
A remarkable commercial flying experience doesn’t begin and end on a plane. For most travelers, the journey starts days before their trip. The busier the airport, the more planning involved. Passenger anxiety builds: Will they drive or rideshare? Get dropped off? Park at the airport? Or is there a competing off-airport option that’s more attractive?
The answers vary widely depending on who’s traveling. Price sensitive passengers, families and business travelers each weigh different variables — cost, wait times, baggage convenience, flexibility — and prioritize them differently.
Airport executives who invest in solving those pain points, from home or hotel to gate and back, see the results in passenger satisfaction scores. A critical piece of that equation is parking. When managed holistically, from digital parking reservations to just-drive-out payment platforms and value-added services like remote bag check-in, airports can give passengers back their most important asset: time.
However, most traditional airport parking operations are limited in their ability to meet passengers where they are today. Legacy procurement processes and fragmented vendor business models have produced disconnected third-party technology ecosystems, including parking access and revenue control systems, reservations providers, revenue and yield management tools and parking management service providers with varying levels of technical sophistication. That fragmentation impacts the passenger experience, drives down satisfaction scores and limits total revenue potential from parking and adjacent non-aeronautical revenue streams.
Following Metropolis’ acquisition of SP Plus in May 2024, we have spent the past two years investing in and obsessing over the passenger experience from home to curb and back. As the country’s largest operator of airport parking, managing nearly half of the top 30 busiest airports and 70+ total United States airports, we have a unique perspective on exactly how technology improves operational outcomes.
Unmatched operational expertise built across 70+ US airports
At Metropolis, we go beyond simply building and deploying advanced technology. We operate complex infrastructure at scale. Our portfolio of 70+ U.S. airports informs every product we build. International hubs like O'Hare, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Detroit and Miami trust us to manage their complex parking operations and collect over $2 billion in parking revenue. They also trust us to identify and help solve problems. What changed after the SP Plus acquisition is that we gained the capabilities to implement those solutions ourselves at full scale.
As we invest in our aviation platform, we’re positioned to build technology tailored specifically to airport customers, drawing on decades of operational expertise — from parking management to shuttle and ground transportation — and consolidated insights from across the country’s largest, most complex airports.
We have a massive footprint to inform technology development: We currently manage over 70 total airport parking operations, including 14 of the top 30 U.S. airports.
Our operational scale requires continuous innovation: In 2025, our more than 5,000 aviation operations team members managed the parking experience for over 32 million vehicles and shuttled more than 63 million passengers. Our AeroParker reservations platform accepted over 5 million parking bookings.
We move with speed to bring solutions to our customers: Our teams deploy fast, launching overflow lots in under a week, standing up new shuttle programs in under a month and bringing reservations online in days. They also support traffic planning and parking load management during periods of construction through our consulting services.