Vallie Rolls Out Innovative Parking Solution In London
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Vallie brings a new approach to parking to London, with a valet-style parking solution that allows drivers to leave their cars at their destinations of choice, handing over the keys to a Vallie “valet” who will take the car to a pre-approved, secure parking location. Customers can check on the location of their cars throughout the parking process and can retrieve their cars within 15 minutes.
The Vallie service was originally rolled out as a limited pilot in London in late 2015, where the app saw a 75% return rate for first-time users. The current expansion of the solution in London includes new partnerships with commercial parking and a suite of additional services, including electric charging — or, for less fortunate ICE drivers, petrol refills (hah!) — and car washes. Services such as these are increasingly being added to premium airport parking systems, so the addition to the Vallie full-service parking solution makes sense.
The premium service is focused on maximizing the value to the consumer, filling whatever time the service has possession of the car with value-add services. Consumers are increasingly looking for this type of service — especially when it comes to electric vehicles, which often struggle to find a plug, then have to deal with shuffling cars around to maximize the number of vehicles that can be charged in a single day from each outlet. Think of it as the manual valet counterpart to the fully automated solution Tesla is working on.
The pilot run of the Vallie solution showed that it was most popular with 30- to 55-year-old working professionals around rush hour — presumably, the times when parking is also the most congested and where the service would offer the largest benefit — at hourly and daily rates that are comparable (or better in some cases) to onstreet parking in London.
Vallie co-founder and CEO, Nash Islam, shares that Vallie has no plans to rest on the early success of the pilot:
“We are excited to be scaling up our secure, convenient and affordable solution to parking challenges across London. We are also planning a future where parking is more effective, decreases congestion and cuts down on parking space, freeing the capital up for housing and green spaces. We think of Vallie as a DHL for cars, and in the future, want to create car parks that help manage the flow of traffic, while safely and cheaply storing and maintaining cars inside.”
Nash Islam, a serial entrepreneur and angel investor, previously head of mobile operations at Google, founded Vallie with Oxford graduate Robin Doble, who previously founded app-based car-washing service GoWashMyCar after spending time working at Barclays. The idea for Vallie grew from the pains the pair experienced when attempting to park in London, which, on average, takes 20 minutes. Rolling this up, one finds that the average motorist in the UK wastes 106 days of their life looking for parking!
For more information, head on over to www.vallie.co.uk
All images via Vallie
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