Stellos Playbook · Hotel

How to Fill Your Hotel's Empty Parking (and What It's Worth)

Let me tell you about an asset your hotel owns that is empty for a large part of every day, and that people a short walk away would happily pay to use. The car park. And to show you how to turn those empty hours into income, let me start with a little story.

Stellos operates parking technology across Switzerland and Germany, trusted by teams at Google, Swisscom, Implenia, Wincasa, CWS and Sony.

The pattern hiding in plain sight

A revenue manager finally plotted when the hotel car park was actually full. Guests mostly arrived in the evening and left in the morning, so the bays sat largely empty from nine to five on weekdays, exactly when the offices around the corner were turning people away for lack of parking. The demand was next door, on the opposite schedule, and the hotel was selling none of it.

Here is the insight: a hotel's parking demand and a neighbourhood's parking demand often peak at different times. That mismatch is not a problem, it is the opportunity. Empty bays are not idle, they are unsold inventory.

Who pays for the empty hours

Once you see it as inventory, the buyers are obvious. Nearby offices and residents want predictable monthly or daytime spots. Event and venue overflow pays a premium on specific evenings. Transient and visitor demand fills the gaps by the hour. The trick is to sell the hours guests do not need while always protecting the ones they do, so a full house never finds its own car park sold out.

How to sell it without disrupting guests

This is where it becomes a management problem, not a sales one. You ring-fence a guest allocation, release the surplus to non-guests, and price it by time and demand with dynamic pricing. None of it is safe or workable without access control that knows who belongs in the garage and bills each group correctly (ANPR vs cards vs mobile). Done right, guests never notice, and the dead hours start earning.

Why it is worth quantifying

And here is why owners care: recovered parking income is almost pure net operating income, and at hotel cap rates even a modest annual gain lifts the asset's value by a multiple of itself (ROI and NOI methodology). So the first step is simply to measure it: how many bays, how they are used across the week, and what the empty hours are worth. Let me show you that for your hotel. For the wider picture, this is one piece of hotel parking management.