It’s a must-have feature for any world-class airport, and D/FW is the world’s third-busiest airfield. But D/FW’s own airport valet had a problem in its first 18 months, a recent consultant’s report found: The airport would have made more money by just shutting it down.

That brow-furrowing conclusion is at the heart of a debate over the valet service provided by Parking Concepts Inc. and the special privileges granted to it by the airport.

The private companies that operate parking lots outside the airport – FreedomPark, the Airport Valet and the Parking Spot – say they’ve been put at a competitive disadvantage.

“We’re just asking for a level playing field,” said Ken Kundmueller, owner of FreedomPark.

“I think there’s been enough data provided to the airport staff to show this isn’t making money, but they’re going to continue to try it,” said Kundmueller, who has urged his customers to express their displeasure with airport board members over what he sees as unfair treatment.

PCI counters that it launched the valet service at great risk to the company’s bottom line and, though it has lost at least $2.5 million on the venture, believes it can be successful with the airport’s help.

“We assumed huge risk when we took this,” said PCI vice president David Mueller. “We wouldn’t have done it if we didn’t think there was also a large upside to the business.”

Irvine, Calif.-based PCI also disputes the consultant’s conclusion that the airport could earn more total parking dollars by terminating its valet operator’s business.

For the airport’s part, spokesman David Magaña said it will study “all of its parking products” in coming months to determine whether changes need to be made.

“We continue to believe that D/FW Airport valet is providing what customers want in the marketplace,” he said.

D/FW is the only airport in the country to let off-airport valet operators compete for business inside its terminals. (Las Vegas lets off-site valet companies compete, but they can only take customers from an off-site location to the airport.)

But with five large terminals, D/FW isn’t the easiest place to run a valet operation. PCI has a staff of 175 to man 14 drop-off points; smaller airports have just one or two drop-off areas.

As part of its contract with the airport, PCI has been granted several advantages over its off-site competitors. Among them:

•Only PCI can take “walk-up” valet customers; competitors must rely on reservations only.

•Only PCI has branded podiums in the short-term parking space.

•Only PCI avoids fees for bringing cars on and off the airport property.

In addition, PCI gets to use 1,300 spaces at Terminal D to park cars, and the airport pays for its marketing. Competitors must pay for their overhead to store cars in lots outside the airport.

With its advantages, PCI has 27 percent of the D/FW valet market, compared with FreedomPark’s 54 percent, according to a report issued Nov. 24 by the Jacobs Consultancy. But PCI’s Mueller said his company is performing better today than when the study was completed last summer.

According to the Jacobs report, D/FW Airport received about $900,000 from PCI in the first full year of its contract. But the report also concluded that the airport would have netted as much as $857,000 more without the contract.

D/FW now gets 22 percent of the valet money collected by PCI. Without the valet service, the Jacobs report said, most valet customers would pay $17 a day to park in lots near the terminals – 100 percent of which would go to the airport.

But PCI believes those valet customers would not park at the terminals and instead would use one of the off-site valet companies that pay the airport only 10 percent of their fees. Thus, Mueller said, the airport would fare worse.

Having lost nearly $2.5 million in the first 15 months of its contract, PCI asked in May for its contract terms to be eased. The contract called for PCI’s fees to increase to 35 percent of its revenue; the airport board agreed to keep it at 22 percent indefinitely.

Magaña said the airport expects to address PCI’s contract in coming months and is considering all options, including the possibility of reworking the terms.

While acknowledging its start-up losses, PCI sees its business at D/FW now as “nearly break-even” and is committed to making the contract work, Mueller said.

Under the terms of its contract with the airport, PCI must double its number of customers in the next two years; the Jacobs report notes this will be difficult and suggests mutually terminating the deal could be an option.

“We’re going to continue to work with the airport on it,” Mueller said when asked whether PCI will either seek different terms or permission to charge customers higher rates.

PCI has lowered its daily valet rate to $17 for some corporate customers in an attempt to win more business; detractors say that tactic will simply cost the airport more money as it encourages travelers to bypass the airport’s most-profitable terminal parking.

Remote lots

Along with its struggling valet operations, the airport is also losing money on its remote parking lots, the cheapest of three options it offers customers who choose to park on airport property.

The North and South remote lots lost D/FW $1.3 million in 2008 and $1.9 million in 2009 when local airport traffic fell as much as 20 percent from the year earlier. The airport raised the daily rate on the remote lots to $8 a day from $7 last fall.

It has held off increasing the top $17-a-day self-park rate despite research showing that rate to be a bargain among big airports. Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport charges $51 a day to park in its international terminal; its valet rate is $46 a day. Los Angeles International Airport charges $30 a day for terminal parking and $38 a day for valet.

Nearly $2 of every $3 spent for parking at or around D/FW goes to terminal parking. D/FW’s express parking – where passengers are picked up by a shuttle bus at their car and driven to terminals – is marginally profitable, airport documents show.

Off-airport parking competitors question why the airport subsidizes its money-losing parking service while three off-airport self-parking companies offering the same service have failed in recent years.

“They’re willing to lose money on their products, but meanwhile four of the seven off-airport parking operators have failed in the past five years,” FreedomPark’s Kundmueller said. “We provide the service at much lower costs than the airport can.”

Despite the stiff competition, the off-airport operators, whose valet fees range from $15 to $22 a day, aren’t in danger of going out of business.

Kundmueller and John Biebighauser, who owns Airport Valet, said their operations are profitable. Officials at the Parking Spot, where valet service is a fraction of its much-larger self-parking business, declined to comment.

Although valet service has been among the airport board’s most contentious issues over the last two years, it’s hardly a threat to balancing its books.

Airport valet – both PCI’s operations and the off-airport competitors – rang up about $12 million a year. Meanwhile, overall parking revenue approaches $100 million in an average year for D/FW, which collects nearly $600 million in total revenue in a given fiscal year.

“This has never been primarily about revenue for us,” said Magaña. “We think it’s about providing a better passenger experience.”

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11:44 PM CDT on Tuesday, September 15, 2009

By MICHAEL A. LINDENBERGER / The Dallas Morning News

Cheeseheads and fans of America’s Team are longtime football rivals, but they will share one thing this season: Few fans in the NFL have as hard a time getting to the stadium.

Only frostbitten fans at Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wis., are left with as few transportation options as the 100,000-plus fans who will pack the newest, fanciest and priciest stadium in the NFL when the Cowboys face the New York Giants on Sunday.

If you live in Dallas – home of the one of the most aggressively expanding light-rail lines in North America – and were hoping to catch a ride on the train to the game, you might as well be living in Green Bay.
The Cowboys and Packers are not alone in lacking light-rail service to their stadiums, though many teams have metro stops just outside their gates.

But even Indianapolis, Buffalo and Phoenix – three cities far more famous for football than for transit options – run regular bus lines right past their stadiums and offer easily available shuttles to the games. Such options don’t exist in Arlington and Green Bay.

Come Sunday, fans here will be confronted with a dizzying array of options once they arrive at Cowboys Stadium – beginning with whether to pay big bucks for a seat or spend just $29 for an all-day tailgate in the Party Zone.

But getting there won’t be easy. To reach Arlington, America’s largest city without a single bus line or passenger rail line, they can drive through some of the most heavily congested and construction-snarled roads in the region, or they can take a cab or hire a limousine service.

“Unfortunately, the construction isn’t going to be finished until next year,” said Mayor Robert Cluck, who has been championing the Cowboys’ relocation to Arlington for most of the past decade.
“So far, it’s not been too terrible of a pain,” he said, noting that traffic has flowed more quickly in and out of the stadium during pre-season events than many had predicted.

When you get there, you’ll pay through your facemask to park. Most team-owned parking lots will run $75, and that still leaves patrons with a hike.

And while Jones’ new stadium has nearly every other amenity for his team’s wealthiest fans, there is no heliport on site. And even if there was, not even a Texas millionaire willing to pay thousands to sit in a luxury suite would be likely to hire a helicopter for the trip in from Dallas.
The only transit solution for the entire stadium will be shuttle buses operated by Fort Worth’s transit agency, which will ferry folks from a park-and-ride lot in downtown Fort Worth beginning two hours before kickoff at each home game. Rides will be $5 per person, cash only, and another $5 per vehicle to park there.  Another option is to hire a Dallas limousine to take you to the game.

Joan Hunter, spokeswoman for The T, said the lot will hold 350 vehicles and the agency plans to shuttle up to 1,000 fans to the game and back.

The lack of transit options in Arlington, population 365,000, is deliberate – and comes despite the best efforts of city leaders and regional planners.

Voters in the past three decades have rejected three initiatives that would have dedicated sales taxes to transit, including twice since 2002.
“They don’t want it,” said former Arlington Mayor Elzie Odom, who retired as mayor in 2003. “It doesn’t do any good to argue. We have done that three times. The residents who bother to go to the polls just won’t have it.”

Voters did approve the new stadium, which cost $1.1 billion and was paid for in part by a half-cent sales tax increase. Even the new stadium, and the traffic troubles that come with it, haven’t persuaded voters to think again about transit, he said.

“In the last two elections, I have heard over and over, “We don’t want those kinds of people.’ People say they just want to be let alone.”
Cluck said he has often heard residents opposed to transit cite worries about race or class as their reasons for voting no. But more often, he said, the complaints center on residents’ predictions that a transit system Arlington could afford would involve buses – and big empty ones at that.

“It’s not a good thing that we don’t have any type of public transportation in Arlington,” said Cluck, who has championed transit since becoming mayor in 2003. The most recent failure was regional in scope: Arlington officials, including Cluck, had been big supporters of the North Texas push to persuade the Texas Legislature this year to support a local-option gas tax that would have paid for suburban rail service.

That effort failed, after splits among local lawmakers helped make already long odds impossible to overcome. “But we’re going to go back and try again,” Cluck said.

The lack of transit never gave the Cowboys pause, however.
“We were very clear that there was no transit, and voters had voted it down three times,” Cluck said.

Team spokesman Brett Daniels confirmed that Tuesday.
“We have always worked on all of our traffic plans with the assumption that there would be no transit,” Daniels said. “But with our lots, and the parking spots from the Rangers, and with communicating with fans to ride together as often as possible, I think we’ve adapted fairly well.”
He said the team controls about 12,000 spots, not counting lots on loan from the Rangers. All told, he said they expect about 30,000 vehicles on Sunday.

Cluck said getting in and out of the stadium isn’t as difficult for motorists as it seems, despite obviously heavy traffic.

“We’ve already had some events that drew a lot of people,” Cluck said, noting a recent soccer match that brought more than 82,000 fans to the stadium. “That’s close to capacity, and getting in and out of the stadium wasn’t too bad. There are 14 ways to get in and out, compared to just four ways at Texas Stadium. That’s really helped.”

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