Why pre-booking should be a key priority for your airport this holiday season

The holiday season represents the highest-stakes period in airport parking. Demand surges, passengers are price-sensitive yet anxious about availability, and every decision you make about pricing and capacity has an immediate, visible impact on your bottom line. 

Yet many airports approach this critical period with the same strategy they use year-round: static pricing, limited online booking capabilities, and a hope that drive-up traffic will fill the gaps. It’s a strategy that leaves significant revenue on the table precisely when you can least afford to do so. 

The airports getting it right this holiday season aren’t just offering pre-booking as an option. They’re building their entire holiday parking strategy around it, using pre-booking as the engine that drives better pricing, smoother operations, and stronger revenue performance. 

Here’s why pre-booking matters more during the holidays than at any other time of year, and how you can make it work for your operation. 

Why usual parking strategies can fall short during the holidays 

Holiday travel creates a perfect storm of parking challenges that expose the weaknesses of traditional, drive-up-focused operations. 

Demand becomes wildly unpredictable. You know the holiday period will be busy, but without bookings, you can’t distinguish between “very busy” and “completely sold out” until passengers start arriving. This makes staffing decisions difficult, creates potential safety issues when facilities overflow, and leads to frustrated passengers who arrive to find no available spaces. 

Price sensitivity peaks alongside willingness to pay. Holiday travellers are budget-conscious; they’re spending on gifts, travel, and accommodation. Yet they’re also desperate for convenience and certainty. This creates a complex pricing environment where you need to balance competitive rates with demand-based pricing, a task that static pricing can’t achieve. 

Operational strain intensifies. Holiday periods test your systems, staff, and processes in ways normal operations don’t. Without visibility into demand, you’re either overstaffed and burning budget or understaffed and creating service failures. Neither scenario is acceptable during your busiest revenue period. 

Competition increases from off-site operators. Third-party parking providers become more aggressive during holidays, often undercutting airport rates or offering enhanced services. Without a strong pre-booking value proposition, you’re vulnerable to losing market share when it matters most.

The airports that succeed during the holidays recognise these challenges early and build strategies specifically designed to address them. The sooner you realise that pre-booking is the solution, and not a part of the solution, the better. 

Why is pre-booking useful during the holiday rush? 

When you implement pre-booking effectively, it transforms how you manage holiday parking demand. Here’s what changes: 

You gain predictability in an unpredictable period. Every pre-booking gives you advance visibility into demand patterns. You can see peak arrival and departure days, popular product types, and booking velocity. This data allows you to make informed decisions about pricing, capacity allocation, and resource deployment days or weeks in advance rather than reacting in real-time. 

You can optimise pricing dynamically. With pre-booking data, you can implement demand-based pricing that maximises revenue, rewarding early bookers. As capacity fills and departure dates approach, rates adjust upward to reflect scarcity. This approach captures willingness to pay across different passenger segments while ensuring you’re not leaving money on the table during peak periods. 

Your operational efficiency improves dramatically. When you know in advance that December 20th will have 800 arrivals and December 27th will have 900 departures, you can staff accordingly. You can plan shuttle schedules, prepare overflow areas if needed, and communicate proactively with passengers. The chaos of “surprise” demand disappears. 

You create competitive advantages. Pre-booking allows you to offer guarantees that drive-up facilities can’t match: guaranteed space, locked-in pricing, faster entry and exit, and the peace of mind that comes from having one less thing to worry about during holiday travel. These benefits resonate strongly with holiday travellers and help you compete effectively against off-site operators. 

Your revenue per space increases. According to management consulting firm Arthur D. Little, implementing yield management systems alongside early reservation discounts can increase revenues by 6% to 8% annually. During the high-volume holiday period, even modest percentage improvements translate to substantial absolute revenue gains. 

The key is recognising that these benefits don’t happen automatically. They require deliberate strategy and the right technology foundation. 

Five ways airports are using pre-book during the holidays

The airports that thrive during the holidays share common approaches to pre-booking.  

Here’s what they do differently:

1. Holiday campaigns are launched early

The best-performing airports don’t wait until December to promote holiday parking. They begin marketing pre-booking options in October, targeting passengers who are planning holiday travel. Early campaigns create awareness, establish the value proposition, and begin capturing bookings while passengers are still in planning mode rather than panic mode. 

These campaigns emphasise the dual benefits of pre-booking: better rates for early commitment and guaranteed availability during the busiest travel period of the year. The messaging is clear, the booking process is frictionless, and the value is immediately apparent.

2. Tiered pricing capture different segments

Smart airports recognise that holiday travellers aren’t the same. Some book flights six months in advance. Others wait until the last minute. Some are extremely price-sensitive. Others prioritise convenience above all else. 

Tiered pricing through pre-booking allows you to serve all these segments profitably. Early bird rates capture the planners. Standard pre-book rates serve the mainstream. Last-minute pre-book rates (still better than drive-up) capture late deciders. Drive-up rates remain the highest, incentivising advance booking while still serving walk-up customers. 

This approach, supported by dynamic pricing rules, ensures you’re maximising revenue from every customer segment without leaving capacity unused.

3. Products are bundled to increase basket size

Holiday travellers are already spending money and making decisions about their trip. This creates a perfect opportunity for you to bundle parking with other airport services, including lounges, fast-track security, and meet-and-greet services, particularly if you’re looking to increase basket size and generate more non-aeronautical revenue through upselling and cross-selling. 

Pre-booking platforms make bundling seamless. A passenger booking parking sees relevant add-ons at the moment of purchase, when they’re already committed, and their payment information is entered. Conversion rates on bundled products are significantly higher than when you sell these services separately or on arrival. 

For airports that are still developing their commercial programmes, this represents a straightforward way to increase revenue per customer without complex new initiatives or significant operational changes.

4. Proactive communications are used proactively throughout the journey

Pre-booking creates a direct communication channel with your passengers. Smart airports use this to enhance the experience and reduce operational friction. 

Confirmation emails with clear directions and what to expect, reminder messages a few days before arrival, real-time updates if there are any service changes, and post-visit surveys to gather feedback, deliver a more personalised passenger experience, reinforce the value of pre-booking and improve satisfaction, and increase the likelihood passengers will pre-book again.

5. Performance is analysed consistently

Top-performing airports use data-driven approaches and technology to improve the passenger experience. They track conversion rates by traffic source, analyse booking windows and price sensitivity, identify which products perform best and which marketing messages resonate most strongly. 

This data becomes the foundation for continuous improvement. Each holiday season performs better than the last because lessons learned inform next year’s strategy. This is particularly valuable if you’re concerned about keeping up with technology and maximising non-aeronautical revenue; pre-booking provides both the modern platform and the revenue growth mechanism. 

Common concerns about holiday pre-booking 

Despite the clear benefits, some airports hesitate to fully embrace pre-booking during the holidays. Your concerns are understandable but generally unfounded when systems are properly implemented. 

“What if we oversell and can’t honour bookings?” Modern pre-booking platforms include inventory management controls that prevent overselling. You set capacity limits by product type and date. The system stops accepting bookings when limits are reached and you maintain full control while gaining the benefits of advance sales. 

“Our passengers prefer drive-up and won’t change their behaviour.” Passenger behaviour follows incentives. If pre-booking offers no advantage, behaviour won’t change. But when pre-booking delivers better rates, guaranteed space, and faster processing, behaviour shifts quickly. European airports report online penetration rates exceeding 60% in mature markets by making pre-booking demonstrably better than alternatives. 

“We don’t have the staff or systems to manage pre-booking.” This concern often reflects experience with outdated or poorly designed systems. Modern platforms like Propel are specifically designed to improve your operational efficiency. Automated inventory management, integrated payment processing, and self-service customer management mean pre-booking requires less staff intervention than managing drive-up capacity in real-time. 

“We’re not ready to implement this for the upcoming holidays.” While ideal implementation takes planning, you can launch basic pre-booking capabilities relatively quickly, particularly if you’re working with experienced partners who’ve done this many times before. Even partial pre-booking adoption during the holidays can deliver meaningful results and provide learning for future seasons. 

What you need for a successful pre-booking approach 

Successful holiday pre-booking requires three core elements: 

1. The right technology platform 

You need a booking system that’s fast, mobile-optimised, and integrated with your operations. The passenger experience must be seamless; any obstacles during the booking process will prompt your customers to seek an alternative solution. The platform must also give you control over pricing, inventory, and reporting so you can manage performance actively rather than hoping for the best. 

Solutions like Propel are purpose-built for airport environments, handling the specific requirements of parking operations while enabling the flexibility needed for sophisticated holiday strategies. 

Propel delivers the core capabilities that make pre-booking successful: seamless booking flows that let passengers browse, book, and pay in just a few clicks; flexible pricing management that lets you sell the right products at the right prices with detailed reporting at every step; crystal-clear insights so you always know when inventory is approaching capacity or when certain products need promotion; and the ability to bundle parking with other services like lounges and fast-track security to increase basket size during high-value holiday bookings. 

2. Strategic pricing frameworks 

Technology alone isn’t enough. You need pricing strategies that incentivise early booking, maximise yield during peak periods, and remain competitive throughout. This means understanding your market, analysing competitor pricing, and implementing dynamic rules that adjust rates based on demand signals and booking windows. 

If you’re struggling with revenue management or operating with limited systems, this is where expert guidance becomes valuable. The difference between good and great pricing can represent millions in annual revenue. 

3. Clear communication and marketing 

Your passengers won’t pre-book if they don’t know it’s an option or don’t understand the benefits. Your holiday pre-booking campaign needs to start early, communicate clearly, and appear consistently across channels: website, email, social media, and even on-airport signage. 

Your message should emphasise both rational benefits (better rates, guaranteed space) and emotional benefits (peace of mind, one less thing to worry about during stressful holiday travel). 

If your parking strategy doesn’t centre on pre-booking, you have a decision to make. You can continue with business as usual and accept the revenue, operational, and passenger experience limitations that come with it. Or you can commit to building pre-booking capabilities that position your parking operation for sustainable success. 

The holiday season will be busy regardless. The question is whether that high demand translates to optimised revenue and satisfied passengers, or to missed opportunities, and frustrated customers who remember the experience and avoid your parking next time. 

Many airports are opting to embrace pre-booking because the data, passenger feedback, and financial results all point in the same direction: Pre-booking works. It works for revenue. It works for operations. It works for passengers. And it works especially well during the holidays when the stakes are highest. 

Ready to build a smarter parking strategy? 

Stop leaving revenue on the table with static pricing that doesn’t respond to holiday demand. 

Our comprehensive guide, Why Your Pricing Strategy is Costing You Revenue (And What to Do About It), shows you exactly how to build pricing strategies that support pre-booking and maximise holiday revenue. 

Inside, you’ll discover: 

• How to identify hidden revenue gaps where static pricing is limiting your growth and online conversion 

• Smart pricing models that use dynamic rules and segmentation to align price with demand 

• A scalable framework that flexes with seasonality and passenger behaviour, perfect for holiday peaks 

• Quick wins you can implement immediately to deliver measurable uplift 

• How to turn pricing from an operational burden into a strategic advantage 

Download your free guide now