Part 3 of four

What an Attendant Is Actually For

Labor is the fastest moving part of a parking price and the part with the clearest effect on a driver's day. It is also the part most often described in words that promise more than the job includes.

The four questions

The same four questions, asked of every part
What this part buys	Somebody on the ground who can open a gate that will not open, direct a driver to an empty row, and be a person when something has gone wrong.
What makes it move	Hours of coverage, and how many of those hours are overnight. A lot staffed to midnight and a lot staffed around the clock are different businesses.
What to ask when you call	What hours somebody is physically on the lot, and what happens between those hours.
What cannot be promised about it	That anybody is watching your car. An attendant is present to run the lot, not to keep it under observation, and no operator has told us otherwise.

Staffed and monitored are different words

They get used as though they were one thing.

Staffed means a person is physically on the lot during stated hours, running it: the booth, the gate, the paperwork, the odd jump start.
Monitored usually means cameras record, and recordings are looked at afterwards when somebody asks.

Neither means that a person is watching your vehicle. We say that plainly rather than letting the words do the implying, because the words are ordinarily allowed to do exactly that in this trade.

A small empty attendant booth at the head of a parking row, with a raised barrier arm and wet asphalt around it, in flat gray light — A booth at the head of a row. What it means is that somebody runs the lot during stated hours, and that is a smaller and more useful claim than it looks.

What a person genuinely changes

Four things, all of them ordinary and all of them worth money on the wrong morning.

A gate that will not read your ticket at five in the morning. With somebody there this is ninety seconds. Without, it is a telephone number on a sign and a wait.
A dead battery after nine days in a February lot. Most staffed operations will jump a car; almost no unstaffed one can.
Being directed rather than driving four rows looking for a space with a flight to catch.
Somebody to tell, when the thing that went wrong is the kind of thing that needs a person rather than a form.

What to ask, in one question

Not whether the lot is staffed. Ask what hours somebody is physically on the lot, and what happens outside those hours.

That single question separates every operator into honest categories in about ten seconds, and the answer to the second half is the one that matters, because your flight is at six in the morning and theirs is not.

What this desk will not say

That any operator is licensed, insured, bonded, vetted or supervised. This company has read nobody's paperwork, those are statements about somebody else's regulatory standing, and no license number and no policy number appears anywhere on this site.

What it does instead is name the operator in writing whenever asked, so the question can be put to the party who can actually answer it. Services sets that out against all nine advertised claims.

Practical

Ask the hours, then ask about the gap.
If you land after midnight, the gap is your whole experience of the lot.
Ask whether they jump a battery. It is a small question that tells you the shape of the operation.