The Gown – student newspaper at Queen's University Belfast.

FEATURE: Need help parking?

PARKTxT, the brainchild of six final year Queen’s students is a new organisation providing a text service allowing car-park customers to check:

· How long they have been parked

· How much they have spent

· How long until the next tariff milestone kicks in.

The inspiration behind the business idea comes from the sense of frustration we feel upon having regularly had to pay for a full hour of car parking despite returning only minutes past the previous deadline.

To take advantage of the service, the customer will merely have to text a short code found on their parking ticket to PARKTxT and will in return receive a text back detailing their current stay. It provides the opportunity to spend 25p to save up to £3.00 and take away what many consider to be an unfair advantage held by car parks at present.

Upon carrying out extensive market research within Belfast, it was found that on average, 67% of customers for mainstream city-centre car parks were dissatisfied by the tariffs imposed on them. General sentiments were that car parks are taking advantage of location to exploit shoppers and, while this may have been acceptable three years ago, the current economic climate dictates that this must stop as soon as possible.

People everywhere are keener than ever to watch the pennies. With this in mind, PARKTxT hope to be up and running in numerous popular city-centre car parks within the next eight to ten weeks. It is a valuable opportunity for shoppers; students and professionals everywhere to make a daily saving that will make a big difference at the end of the month!

For more information on PARKTxT please direct correspondence to info@parktxt.com, or alternatively to speak with or schedule an interview with a director, call Sean O’Hanlon on 07877804501.

Tags: Gown, newspaper, qub, Queen's, queen's university, student, The Gown

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 13th, 2010 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.