Fly/cruise car parking services
Penguin Parking have operated cruise parking for Southampton Docks for more than 12 years and in 2022 parked more than 10,000 cars and served over 25,000 passengers, providing a personal and friendly service to each and every customer. Just a couple of minutes from Southampton Cruise Terminals, they are the closest off-site car park to all the port’s cruise terminals.
Client brief
Helen, the owner of Penguin Cruise Parking contacted Angelfish because her current online booking provider had become unresponsive and she was forced to manage her business using a booking system that was slow and difficult to navigate. She had some very specific requirements such as integration with Secure Trading, SMS messaging and the ability to manually update booking records. As the project evolved she also commissioned Angelfish to redevelop her website, which meant that her booking system and website content management system could be managed from one easy-to-use backend portal.
Software functionality and application
Admin Site
- Set up and manage administrators with login and permissions.
- Set up and manage car parks and car parking areas (a car park can have multiple areas).
- Set up and manage spaces (an area can have multiple spaces).
- Set up and manage cruises including prices and price exceptions. Prices will be assigned per cruise, but you will be able to create exceptions where the price for a cruise is changed to a new value between specified dates. This will allow you to turn pricing up/down in response to demand or available space. You will be able to specify which area/s customers on a cruise will be parked in.
- Set up and manage discounts. These can be applied to a cruise or cruises for bookings made between specified dates and can optionally require an offer code to be entered. The usage of each code can be limited to a maximum number that you specify.
- Set up and manage customers.
- Set up and manage vehicles (a customer may have multiple vehicles).
- Set up and manage staff members and specify working dates/times based on drop-off/pick-up levels.
- Set up and manage extras (e.g. postal confirmation, trailers/oversize vehicles, flexible booking).
- Add, update and remove/cancel bookings (a booking consists of a customer on a cruise parking in a specified area for the duration of the cruise).
- View and update payments for each booking. Generally each booking will have a single payment, the full cost made at the time of booking.
- View a calendar showing the availability and booking of spaces with date, area and cruise filters.
- Set up and manage e-mail and SMS message templates for the following events:
- New booking confirmation.
- Notification to customers on a specified cruise to update their required pick up times from the cruise terminal.
- Message to customers about cruise return dates changing.
- View the following reports:
- Bookings by cruise and date range.
- Daily drop-offs and pick-ups with times where specified.
- Car park occupancy by date range.
- Payments received by date range.
Public Booking System
- Customer can select cruises by date range/month and view cruise dates, prices and availability.
- Customer can book parking for available cruises, entering the following information.
- Name, address, telephone and e-mail.
- Number of cars and for each car: registration, make, model, colour, adults and children, required extras.
- Additional information/notes.
- System creates booking and requests payment upon which the booking is confirmed and confirmation e-mail is sent. We suggest using Stripe as a payment mechanism and our costs are based on this, although we can work with other providers.
Other Items
- SMS/E-Mails can be sent from the admin site to all/selected customers on a selected cruise for the following reasons:
- Cruise return date/time has changed and we want to reassure customers that we can accommodate this.
- Request to update their required pick-up time from the cruise terminal – they can enter this via a secure page on the booking system
Angelfish comments
The management of parking facilities was a new area for us and one we really enjoyed working on.