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.
Building the future together with our airport Partners
Two dozen innovative, first-mover U.S. airports — including San Antonio International (SAT), Dayton International (DAY) and Northwest Arkansas National (XNA) — have realized significant financial and experiential upside by partnering with Metropolis. This growing group has implemented the industry’s first integrated technology and operations platform, transforming their locations with reservations, optimized field operations and just-drive-out computer vision payments and access control.
The opportunity extends to individual solutions for specific use cases as well. Chicago O’Hare (ORD) turned to us to improve employee parking access and streamline employee onboarding and offboarding. Houston Airport Systems (IAH and HOU) needed to enforce dwell time limits for rideshare staging lots that often see 10,000+ rideshare vehicles per day. Cleveland Hopkins (CLE) deployed Metropolis mobile vision valet to give passengers a standout curbside valet experience.
Beyond the vehicle: A holistic traveler journey
To eliminate friction and connect every step of the traveler journey — from home or hotel to curb and back — Metropolis extends its aviation services beyond the vehicle. Our Bags business enables Remote Airline Check-In, curbside check-in and offerings like Bags VIP, giving passengers back their time. We also provide curbside management services to keep vehicle and passenger flow efficient at pick-up and drop-off lanes.
Bags Remote Airline Check-In: Airports like San Francisco International (SFO) and Phoenix Sky Harbor (PHX) have introduced our Remote Airline Check-In service.
Bags VIP: This white-glove service picks up bags from the luggage carousel and delivers them directly to the traveler's home, hotel or office, reducing baggage claim wait times to zero.
Comprehensive landside support: We provide airlines and airports with specialized skycap programs, advanced wheelchair assistance services to optimize Service Request (SSR) management and baggage check-in services that allow travelers to bypass terminal lines entirely.
Curbside management: We orchestrate commercial vehicle ground transportation — taxi lane starters, rideshare staging, van and limousine dispatching — to keep traffic moving and curbs organized.
The passenger experience and revenue growth flywheel
When technology, product innovation and operational excellence align, the impact is real. Net Promoter Score and CSAT increase, revenue per enplaned passenger rises and travelers spend more on average at concessions.
The best part? Airports can start anywhere. Partnering with Metropolis means access to a toolkit built to solve real problems immediately, and a platform ready to scale when they are.