Consumer Association warns: these parking apps make parking terribly expensive

Consumer Association: big differences between apps

Consumers Union compared ten popular parking apps on cost, features and user experience. The conclusion? Not every app is as friendly to your wallet. Apps like Tango Parking and the Rabo App score high in satisfaction, with marks above 9. EasyPark dangles at the bottom with a meager 6.3, mainly due to its high fees. In May, EasyPark adjusted its rates, sometimes making users pay as much as seven euros extra per parking session. Yellowbrick also recently increased its service fees.

Unnecessary money lost

Besides high fees, users often run into another problem: parking sessions that continue unnecessarily. Seven of the 10 apps require you to manually stop the parking action yourself. Only three stop automatically as soon as you drive away. Do you forget to exit? Then the counter just keeps running and you pay for minutes or even hours you didn’t park. Moreover, not every app shows the parking rate in advance, so you can be unpleasantly surprised afterwards.

Customer service leaves much to be desired

When you need help, you quickly run into a wall. Over a third of the people who contacted customer service did not receive a solution. And that’s not surprising: many services are unreachable by phone after office hours or can’t be called at all. With apps like the Rabo App and Ease2Pay-On the Go, you can only email or fill out a contact form. That’s cumbersome, especially if, for example, you’re in a parking garage and can’t get your car taken away until the problem is resolved.

So parking apps can be a godsend if you regularly need to get rid of your car in the city, but it pays to take a moment to consider which app you choose. Check in advance what you’ll pay per session, whether the app will stop automatically, and whether you can get help if something goes wrong.

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