Travel Technology - BestParking Helps You Find Cheap Parking in Major Cities and Airports

http://www.bestparking.com/index.php

Courtesy of www.lifehacker.com

You need to park your car and you're crunched for time. You're not in a position to comparison shop parking rates. Thankfully BestParking has already crunched the numbers for you and can help you find the best rate.

How much can you save by comparison shopping? In our tests there was a surprising disparity between the highest priced and lowest priced parking area. In the screenshot above, for example, we searched for parking around Detroit Metro. Among the airport parking garages there was an almost 100% difference between the highest price and the lowest price for parking.

That kind of price gap isn't a big deal if you're only parking for a single day and are willing to pay a little surcharge for convenience but if you're plunking your car in long term parking for a week you could save yourself some serious cash by picking the right lot.

If you didn't plot out which parking garage to use ahead of time, fire up the browser on your mobile phone and head to the mobile version of BestParking to get a last minute rate check.

Just checked it for two the two airports I use most often.

At BOS the rate for central parking is too low, it shows economy parking in the center of the airport instead of off-airport, and does not reflect the Web coupon that makes Preflight (my favorite) much more economical than the others.

It has PVD rates and locations right, as far as I can tell, though again no Web coupon for Preflight.

Both airports have several off-airport options it doesn't show. Some of them may be more economical than those it does.

The SFO information is virtually useless unless you want to know what the various airport owned garages charge. No ParkSFO, etc. :td:

Also, doesn't include SJC (10th largest city in US, and an airport w/ more passengers than many of the listed airports).

http://www.airportparkingconnection.com/

This site has more focus on airport parking.

I can't remember the last time I drove into Manhattan without finding a parking lot on bestparking first. Over the years it's saved me hundreds and hundreds of dollars sometimes using garages that you don't even know are there from the street.

There have been about a dozen or so threads about it in the NY forum.

I've always used airportparkingreservations.com (http://airportparkingreservations.com). They have better than drive-up rates, user reviews, and a broad set of parking lots for SFO and SJC. Having an actual reservation actually saved my butt once. The site also have some truly obnoxious features, like post-reservation voice advertisements, some dumb required fields, and excessive password complexity - seriously, a bad guy who can't see my credit card wants to use my account to make a reservation to park a car?

And speaking of not travel tech related:

elCheapoDeluxe: I think ParkSFO seems like the best choice for most frequent shuttles, but not cheap without coupons, so I often use Anza, which is south of SFO (I live in SJ) and has a decent frequent traveler program.

adambadam: Looks like airportparkingconnection.com has very few airports, and very few choices, at least for the SF Bay area. Choosing a random week in mid-October, it found 1 lot for SFO, and 2 for SJC. Over 10 choices each from airportparkingreservations.