usernamehere

7. inflation.

Champeen07

What do most people do for parking at DAL?

ZapBrannigan

$30 a month for the employee lot south of the airport. Neighborhood isn't that great. If you have an airport beater it's fine, but don't park the wife's Lexus there.

The Parking Spot is $5 a day plus tax with the employee discount. You also get points that add up pretty quickly. Can cash those in one every month or two for a free 3 day trip's worth parking.

The high rollers park at the garage (or if you get a short notice reserve callout from crew sched, they'll pay for it). It used to be $8 a day but I think they just raised the prices again. Military aviators with an air medal of some sort get to park there for free.

You can park in the commuter lot at headquarters but the shuttle is not hugely reliable and takes a while.

Smooth at FL450

Company employee lot is free, then take the shuttle over. Only free parking in the system…

e6bpilot

Dallas is a perfect example in miniature of the parking situation across the whole airline with one exception - there is a free option (more on that).

Paying to park your car that you have to drive to work is a ridiculous concept. My daughters first job right out of college paid for her parking or a transit pass. Every other big airline and most of the regionals also pay for employee parking. Airports charge ridiculously jacked up rates to park your car. Yet we accept it here. Some would even say we embrace it. Why?

Two reasons. First, we have never negotiated it into our contract. Our negotiators would "rather have that money in our paychecks". But is it in our paychecks? I don't know. I seem to get paid within a standard deviation of my legacy peers and yet they have parking included. Weird. Second, there are enough Texas heroes with air medal plates that get free front row parking that just don't care. Not disparaging a good deal. If I wanted to get free parking in Texas, I could too. I just think it's a big reason why nobody has pushed for it.

The free option in Dallas is the employee lot at HQ. I think most pilots do it once and never again. I actually ended up taking an Uber over there from the airport at the end of the one trip that I attempted it on because the shuttle never came. It's terrible and costs more in time than you save in money.

The garage economy parking used to be a good deal at $5 a day. Then it went to $6. Then $8. Just checked, it's $11 now and will certainly go up.

Parking across the system is only going to increase to ridiculous levels as airports attempt to maximize their ROI on that real estate. The only way to insulate ourselves from price gouging is to get parking negotiated into our contract. The fact that it is 2022 and we pay to park our cars at the airport while the guy flipping burgers at Whataburger doesn't is baffling.

Zard

why do you want the balloon to get so squozen? Why do you want us to be bankrupt?

Puckpilot78

I park in Garage C. Just went up to $16/day from 15. Thanks Biden! All contract stuff aside, my time and sanity is too important to slum it at the employee lot. Used to park at Parking Spot covered, which was fine. Reliable busses and close to the terminal. It's covered, but in a Texas hailstorm it won't offer much protection from sideways hail so if you drive a nice(ish) car you'd better watch the weather before you leave it there. The B garage was my go to for quite a while when it was $9/day. Now that covid is over (in Texas anyway) it tends to fill up fast on weekends and holidays. Same with garage A which I believe is now the same price as C. The C garage is super convenient, it's never full, and it has those nifty lights above the stalls to indicate which ones are open. The best part is never having to wait on a bus to a lot, especially right now with the chaos of delayed flights. I can be in my car and on the road home before the last person even gets off the plane.

BLAHBLAHBLAH

I have to make $1000 to pay for my parking after taxes. Many pay more. It’s ridiculous!

WHACKMASTER

Yes, but the KULTURE!!!! Now get back to coloring.

Lewbronski

I know most of the pilot group likes to blow off the idea of paid parking as a frivolous, ancillary expense that we shouldn't waste time negotiating for.

On the other hand, SWAPA and most of the pilot group are super fired up about the pay errors that the company keeps making, as we should be. In fact, SWAPA publishes the amount of money they have recovered for the pilot group as a result of the company making pay errors each month in the RP.

The latest RP says the total amount of pay recovered by SWAPA since 2015 as a result of company pay errors is $8.8 million. That's pretty egregious, right?

Now think about the money that the pilot group has had to spend on parking since 2015 because we don't think it's worth including in the CBA. Using very conservative numbers, let's say the average pilot who pays for parking at SWA from 2015 to now had to spend $30 per month for parking. Then, let's assume that only 6,000 of our pilots, on average, had to pay that $30 per month since 2015.

That would come to a total of $16.3 million, or almost twice as much as SWAPA has recovered in pay errors. If the average rate that SWAPA pilots paid for parking since 2015 was actually $50 per month, that amount increases to $27.3 million, or more than three times as much as SWAPA has recovered in pay errors. I think both of those figures are probably conservative and that the real amount that SWAPA pilots have spent on parking for work is likely even more than either of those numbers.

And most of the pilot group doesn't care about paid parking?