36Kr reported that a Tongcheng Tourism fund has recently invested tens of millions of yuan in Xiaoqiang Park, an online budget parking platform.
After the investment, both parties will cooperate on the integration of travel and transportation needs to optimize the experience for business travelers.
Xiaoqiang Park was founded in March 2015 to provide parking services at airports, high-speed railway stations and other transportation means. The founding members of the team are former employees of Alibaba, Nokia, Siemens and Softbank.
At present, Xiaoqiang Park provides access to more than 100,000 parking spaces at 55 airports, 23 high-speed railway stations, ports, the Disneyland park and other places.
Founder and CEO Yongqiang Liu describes the three key attributes of the platform as:
* Cost-saving: By cooperating with parking lots near the airports, Xiaoqiang Park provides parking at charges 20%-30% that of the relatively high parking fees imposed by airports.
* Point-to-point connection: Car owners do not need to hand over their car keys during the whole process; the parking lots will provide transfer services between the parking and the airport terminals.
* Vehicle safety: “Xiaoqiang Park provides parking space insurance coverage as soon as a parking lot comes under our management.”
The platform has amassed more than 2 million users and helped them save over 500-million-yuan parking fees.
In addition to the core parking business, it also provides domestic and international airport pick-up/drop off, overseas car rental, petrol refilling, auto insurance, outbound WiFi, car wash, and online consultation and payment for traffic violations.
Liu considers the direct control over parking resources as the edge of Xiaoqiang Park. “We adopt a cross-shareholding approach to work with the parking lots near major airports in China so as to draw in resources”.
Also, the company owns its partner parking lots and has exclusive operating rights during the contract period, and it runs the lots with an online and offline profit-share mode.
The Parking + Relay mode of Xiaoqiang Park is able to rope in more parking lots, which in turn helps to relieve parking needs on airport lots while also saving money for vehicle owners.
Going forward, Xiaoqiang Park will continue to acquire more lots near airports, high-speed rail stations and ports, as well as offer vehicle maintenance, new retail and air travel-related services. It expects to host a total of 200 parking lots in 2019.
By 2020, the company will explore urban parking possibilities for hospitals, schools, CBDs, theme parks, etc., and develop offshoot services from parking reservations, venturing into car rental, auto finance, auto e-commerce and other areas.
