Park and Fly. Courtesy - Blackberry

Last week, I had to fly out of town to Greece from Frankfurt International Airport. Recession in Germany impelled me to look for the most cost effective option available to commute to and from the Airport. My flight ticket had cost me about 48 Euros and I was reluctant to spend anything more than that. The strikingly disciplined State owned Deutsche Bahn (DB) would cost me ~ 50 Euros! One of my colleagues suggested me to look for private ParkPlatz (Parking Place) near to Frankfurt which offer cheaper options.

Google came to my rescue and phew! was soon on the page of Park and Fly! The parkplatz was located 15 kms away from the Airport but all I had to to do is drive to the parplatz with a time buffer of 20 mins. The personnel at the parkplatz would drop me back to the Airport immediately and even pick up on my return!! Was indeed surprising. The cost? 40 bucks - dirt cheap; having given the fact that I can call for hitch hikers. I make 20 bucks from the hitch hikers and shell out 20 more from my pocket. Sounded a great deal.

I managed to get two hitch hikers, dropped them at the Terminal and drove to the Parkplatz. It was an irregular open piece of land of about 10000 sq ft fully occupied with Autos (German name for Cars) I got in and squeezed my Audi into a corner, collected the receipt and was on my way back to the Airport in his car. Took about 15 mins and I put my naive German into test to talk a bit to the Business User.

While he was getting incessant calls, I almost immediately guessed he's a busy man. He told me that the parkplatz is open 24*7 with just two people managing the show. My only question was how does he manage all appiontments during such peak times. He then gave me the complete picture within the next 10 mins (as any German would do)

He gets requests from three sources: Internet (through his website), phone calls, or people who drive in to take a chance. Each of the requests from the website gets logged into his MS Outlook through a simple program that he got done from a small time company. The appointments from Calls are manually transferred to Outlook by whomever receives the call, so is the case when people just drive in. This was the setup since 2 years and it worked fine but they were pissed off by this tedious process of looking into their calendars every now and then and making note in a scrap/make calls between both of them almost 50 times a day.

Since last two months, they have a Blackberry and bingo!!! There was a sudden gush of eternal satisfaction on his face the moment he waved his blackberry at me. He synchronises it with Outlook and he's on the move! His car is now clean without stickies and scraps, has a cool head; he's on top of his business and most importantly, he has happy customers. He says when he picks up the customers on time on their arrival - they're almost everytime so amazed that they return!

That was a business case for me. And so he was a Business User. Enquired about cost benefit and he grinned:) Ofcourse, a bit of investment but he's happy to have a relaxed smoke while waiting for his customer in the Terminal than breaking his head into the crap PC:)

A small time parkplatz owner using technology to ease his life. Go baby Go!