The
Near Airport Parking Industry Trade Association launched in 2015 to be a voice
for national parking operators dedicated to providing dependable, affordable and
high-customer-service parking options at major American airports. Representing
our more than 12,000 employees and more than 10 million yearly parking
customers, we set out with what we thought would be a simple goal: establishing
a federal working group to give all stakeholders a venue to look at, understand
and address the issues affecting the airport curb.
Ground
transportation operators are vital partners to the aviation industry. You
cannot get to an airport or on a plane without some form of ground
transportation. However, airports alone control access to their curbs for all
types of ground transportation, including taxis, limos, ride-share services,
rental cars, etc., and American airports have made it clear they have no
interest in leveraging the expertise of ground transportation providers and our
membership to collaboratively craft transportation policy that best serves the
traveling public.
Without
such a venue to engage and appeal with our ground transportation peers directly
to the federal government, near airport parking operators, our employees, and
our customers are being left behind.
Unfortunately,
the Covid-19 pandemic has made things exponentially worse for our operators.
The
near-airport parking industry is entirely reliant upon air travel. No bodies on
planes, means no cars in our lots. As air travel continues at near-zero levels,
NAPTIA’s operators across the country have seen more than a 95 percent drop in
revenues. In Q2 alone, the industry was down nearly $400 million, and we expect
travel volumes could be down for years to come.
Our
industry’s national operators, who, combined, employed roughly 5,000 pre-Covid,
have had to make the incredibly difficult decisions to lay off or furlough
nearly 90 percent of our workforces while closing many of our parking
facilities at the more than 60 major airports we serve. Yet, we remain unable
to easily access federal programs, including both the Paycheck Protection
Program and the Main Street Lending Program, specifically purposed for helping
companies like ours—those who have been most impacted by Covid-19.
Dishearteningly, neither the House’s Moving Forward Act nor the Senate’s
Health, Economic Assistance, Liability Protection and Schools Act fix
this, again leaving us without access to any federal assistance.
At the
same time, America’s airports have been given direct appropriations to stay
afloat during this unprecedented downturn in travel. Because near-airport
parking industry operators complement but also directly compete with airports
for ground transportation services, it’s not unreasonable for us to be
concerned about these entities taking federal dollars and using them in
competition-killing manner to prioritize their own parking assets. Adding
insult to injury, airports have demanded near-airport parking operators
continue to pay access and permitting fees without any meaningful relief and
have even gone so far as to try to grab a percentage of revenues generated from
the creative repurposing of our lots with non-airport related business to be
able to come out on the other side of this pandemic. These sorts of actions,
while not entirely new, have further jeopardized our industry’s ability to stay
in business, and it is extremely concerning that the HEALS Act proposes to
grant airports an additional $10 billion without the requirement to assist
industry partners in their airport ecosystems.
Without
access to any federal loan or grant programs or reasonable treatment from
airport partners, the near-airport parking industry will not survive this
pandemic. So, we desperately call for Congress and the Administration to throw
a lifeline to the businesses like ours hit hardest by coronavirus.
We have
to wonder, would we be in this anti-competitive, precarious situation with no
federal assistance if our calls for a federal airport ground transportation
stakeholder working group to discuss the entire aviation and ground
transportation ecosystem had been answered? Potentially. But we think likely
not. We believe this venue could have granted us the essential opportunity to
share Covid’s impact on the aviation and travel industry holistically and bring
to the forefront the plight of partners to the aviation industry outside of
airlines and airports themselves.
NAPITA’s
mission is to partner with airports and other stakeholders in the aviation
industry to ensure safe, efficient and equitable access to their airport curb
for off-airport parking operators and to increase the role ground
transportation plays in the broader air travel industry and the overall
experience for air travelers. Standing up a federal stakeholder working group
is essential to our goal. However, we won’t be able to fight if we don’t exist,
and we ask Congress and the Administration to provide relief to the near-airport
parking industry before it’s too late.