New Parking App Whooshes Onto Campus

By Travis Bremner

Last month, Texas Tech Transportation & Parking Services expanded their partnership with Parkeon to provide a new pay-for-parking mobile app on campus called Whoosh.

Stacy Stockard, marketing coordinator for Transportation & Parking Services, said the department thinks Whoosh will offer a better service and will be easier for customers to use. She said the app can automatically locate where a user is parked, which is something most other parking apps do not offer.

Maddy McCarty/The Hub@TTU

“No more location codes to find and enter,” Stockard said.

According its website, Whoosh notifies users when the end of their parking stay is near and allows users to remotely extend the time to avoid citations.

Sean Renn, vice president of sales and marketing at Parkeon Inc., said the current working relationship Texas Tech has with the company made adding an app seamless.

“We’ve worked with Texas Tech for over 15 years operating the parking pay stations,” Renn said in a phone interview. “Getting the station and app integrated into one ecosystem was a natural fit.”

Renn said the app will help Texas Tech operationally avoid having to check various databases to gather information.

Since officially launching on the Texas Tech campus at the end of March, Renn said the 3-year-old app has been a success.

“The launch at Texas Tech has been the strongest in terms of activity through the first couple weeks,” Renn said. “Roughly 40 percent of transactions are mobile rather than at the pay station.”

Renn said he believed two factors caused such high activity early on: Texas Tech students having previous experience paying for parking on an app and Parkeon ambassadors promoting the app on campus during the week of its launch at the end of March.

Renn, who has been a Parkeon employee since 2007, said Whoosh is compatible with the Apple Watch and has features which directly benefit college students.

Travis Bremner/The Hub@TTU

“From the flexible customization of a user’s account to the ability to put multiple vehicles on accounts during parent’s weekend,” Renn said. “Whoosh eliminates error, manual input and makes parking easier for students and non-student users alike.”

This is Texas Tech’s third mobile-pay parking service since implementation in 2002. PaybyPhone, operated by the parking company Verrus, was the first mobile app, followed by MobileNow in 2007. In between MobileNow’s departure from the university and Whoosh’s implementation, there were a few weeks where no mobile parking payment option was available.

John Oglesby, president and CEO of MobileNow, said in a phone interview that parting ways with Texas Tech was due to a desire for increased functionality with Parkeon. He said the two ended on good terms and he would welcome future business with the school.

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