Off-site parking usually isn’t too bad, but if you want to skip the shuttle ride and park right at the airport, you know it’s going to be expensive. Well, not if you park your motorcycle at LAX, but statistically, most people aren’t parking motorcycles at LAX when they fly. At the same time, though, how bad could the damage really be if you didn’t even park at the airport for 30 minutes? $10? $20 at the absolute most, maybe? Well, on Thursday, one man at the Denver International Airport got hit with a nearly $20,000 bill after parking for less than 30 minutes, Denver’s 9 News reports.
Jim Boyd told 9 News that while dropping his wife off for a flight to Germany on Thursday, he parked in the DIA parking garage for a total of 27 minutes. Based on the parking rates posted in the garage, that should have cost him $7. He then paid and left, not really paying attention to the total until the notification he got on his phone about the charge to his credit card played through his truck’s speakers.
“I heard the Chase Bank notification that $19,824 had been charged to Denver parking,” he told the news outlet. “My immediate thought was, oh no, this is just like what I heard on 9NEWS a month ago.” At least he paid with a credit card and not a debit card? Either way, though, yikes.
Not the only incident
The previous incident Boyd referenced took place in late August, when the same parking garage charged Cheryl McConnell $2,310 for 14 hours of parking. Turns out, the system thought she had been parked there from June 25 to August 29. After 9News covered the story, the airport issued a refund and an apology, blaming the absurdly high charge on a system error. At the time, they said, “Our review indicates this is not a widespread issue,” but apparently, McConnell’s husband has also dealt with wonky parking charges in the past, although he’s usually caught the discrepancy before paying.
While $2,300 is a hefty chunk of change, it pales in comparison to the near-as-makes-no-difference $20,000 the airport tried to charge Boyd. But according to the system, he’d been parked there since June 6 at 2:44 p.m.”I went back and looked at my calendar, and there’s no way that was me,” Boyd said. “I was not at DIA on June the 6th,” he told 9News. The good news is, though, he also got his money back:
Airport officials acknowledged Friday that the error was the result of the system confusing Boyd’s license plate with another car’s. The two plates were nearly identical, differing by only a single character: a “B” in place of an “8.”
“We were informed of the incorrect charge on Thursday, Oct. 2,” DIA said in a statement. “Our third-party contractor, LAZ Parking, worked with the customer to immediately refund $19,824 to the customer’s credit card. We also refunded the actual parking fee and apologized for our error.”
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The airport added that its parking system provider, Flash Parking, “has corrected this system error and has updated the parking system software.” Officials said a fix was rolled out to kiosks at 1 p.m. Friday, one day after Boyd’s charge.
