Parking outage at Denver International Airport temporarily traps travelers, results in feelings of "being held hostage"
Denver International Airport's parking kiosk system ran aground Sunday night for about an hour, trapping nearly 1,000 travelers who were trying to leave the airport and get home. The snafu ended up costing the airport about $68,000 in lost parking revenue.
"Sunday night was a bad customer experience and we don't want that to happen," said Mark Nagel, the airport's Senior Vice President of Parking.
He said some of the travelers who couldn't immediately leave the airport complained that they were "being held hostage."
Just before 10 p.m., Nagel said the parking kiosks at the exits of all the airport's public parking lots lost connectivity and credit cards could not be processed. As a result, drivers trying to pay and leave were stranded behind parking gates.
"People want to get home, it's late on a Sunday, people want to go to bed," said Seth Kaplan of Westminster.
He and his wife had been in New York for the weekend but were unable to leave an airport parking lot due to the snafu.
"We wanted to pick up our dog from the dogsitter as soon as possible," said Kaplan.
But he said the couple was stuck at the pay kiosk for about a half hour as the system was down and cars were not allowed to leave. He said drivers were agitated, honking their horns, getting out of their cars and yelling in dismay.
"The people out of their cars were very agitated," said Kaplan.
Unwilling to wait any longer, about 300 drivers pushed the parking arms up and drove away.
"They actually pushed up the gate arm there and drove through the gate," said Nagel.
He said no equipment was damaged. Nagel said airport employees allowed another 700 cars to leave without paying.
"Any revenue loss is a big deal for us," said Nagel, but he said the bad customer experience was equally problematic.
He said the airport will re-train some employees on how to deal with events and situations like what occurred Sunday night.
"We will do much better to improve the customer experience for all who park here," said Nagel.
The outage lasted roughly an hour.
Seth Kaplan said after working in IT, he has a high tolerance for tech failures so he understands "payment systems can be flaky."
While the delay was inconvenient, he was able to skip paying $90 in parking fees.
