The situation has become so bad that travelers as well as those sending them off or picking them up are often hard pressed to find vacant parking slots, especially at the congested Terminal 3 of NAIA.
“Dahil sobrang mura ng rates diyan, alam mo kung sino ang pumaparada? Lahat ng kapitbahay,” San Miguel chair and CEO Ramon Ang said. “Lahat diyan pumaparada kasi it’s the cheapest eh.”
San Miguel is the lead member of the New NAIA Infra Corp. (NNIC) consortium, which includes Korea’s Incheon International Airport Corp., that took over management of the country’s main aviation gateway two weeks ago and will run it for at least 15 years.
On Tuesday, NNIC raised the fee for overnight parking from P300 to P1,200 per 24-hour cycle. Meanwhile, short-term parking fees were also increased marginally from the old rate of P40 to P50 for the first two hours.
The criticism on social media was mainly directed at the large spike in overnight parking rates.
But Ang explained that, prior to the fee hike, the availability of cheap parking has led to patrons of adjacent establishments and nearby residents to park their vehicles at the airport even when they are not traveling.
Data from NNIC showed that, of the 8,000 slots available at NAIA’s four terminals, an average of 500 slots are being used by motorists for overnight parking at cheap rates. The bulk of this is concentrated in Terminal 3’s multilevel parking garage.
NNIC officials explained that, because overnight parking fees were “cheaper than taking Grab [ride hailing services]”, other motorists who with legitimate short-term airport business such as picking up or sending off passengers were being elbowed out of the picture.
The old rates were also substantially cheaper than the P530 per day rate of private operator Park N Fly which operates nearby parking facilities.
The NNIC data showed that 94 percent of all airport parking slots are used for short-term parking, with an average “dwell time” of two to three hours.
This is the user segment that NNIC aims to serve by freeing up to 500 slots that overnight parking users previously had a lock on due to cheap rates. The availability of more slots for short-term parking will ease traffic around the airport terminals, where the roads are often clogged with vehicles driving around in circles while waiting for passengers to arrive, officials explained.
NNIC has also cancelled the parking privileges of “many” private individuals who were previously allowed to use overnight parking services at a concessional rate of only P700 a month.
“That’s P700 a month for parking for them, not per day,” said one NNIC official. “And that doesn’t even include some government officials who paid only P350 per month — not per day — for overnight parking.
More importantly, the government expects the total number of passengers using NAIA to hit 50 million this year. The majority of international travelers go through Terminal 3 which handles an estimated 70,000 passengers per day.
Without decongesting vehicular traffic around the area, NNIC said the situation will become more difficult for passengers.
Ang said the reforms are badly needed to improve mobility in and around the airport, especially for the traveling public.
“Sobrang dami na no relation to the airport, diyan na sila nakaparada lahat,” he said about vehicles clogging NAIA’s parking facilities. “Kasi mahal ang parking sa labas.”
“In short, dahil sa sobrang mura, inaabuso ng kung sino sino,” Ang said. “So this is to discourage non travel-related people from parking. It shouldn’t mean na diyan ka na paparada dahil nakatira ka sa malapit.”
Senior Reporter
