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If you need to leave your car at an airport, you could get a couple of days free thanks to a new partnership between Capital One Business Deals and The Parking Spot.
The Deal
- Get 2 free days of parking + up to 15% off with The Parking Spot via Capital One Business Deals.
- Direct link to offer.
Key Terms
- Expires February 1, 2023 (possibly).
Quick Thoughts
If Capital One Business Deals sounds like yet another new feature from Capital One, don’t worry – it’s not. They’re simply in the process of renaming Capital One Spring (which we’ve written about a number of times before) as Capital One Business Deals. In case you’re not familiar with how Capital One Spring (now Business Deals) works, it’s a free program that’s targeted at businesses. However, they don’t do any kind of business verification, plus anyone can register for an account – you don’t have to have a Capital One credit card to sign up.
What is new is this partnership with The Parking Spot. If you’re not familiar with The Parking Spot – I certainly wasn’t until I spotted it on the Capital One Business Deals website yesterday – it’s a company that offers airport parking services. They currently have a presence at 22 airports in the US including LAX, ATL, PHX, EWR, DFW, DEN, MCO, PHL, IAH, SLC, BWI and more.
The partnership with Capital One Business Deals says you get 15% off and two free parking days, so I decided to test it out to see if that’s true. I clicked through from Capital One Business Deals and created an account which was nice and quick. Sure enough, 740 points – enough for two free days – instantly appeared in my account.
**Update: When registering, The Parking Spot asks you to select which airport you’ll use. It looks like they’ll give you enough points for two free nights at the parking lot based on however many points are required at that particular location. In my case, that was two sets of 370 points for MCO, but DMoney has pointed out in the comments that they received 1,260 points for selecting EWR, with those points being useable at any location – not just EWR. Based on DMoney’s research, it appears that the airport you should select when signing up is LAX as that’ll earn you 1,500 points.**
The description of the offer on Capital One Business Deals says “The 2 free days of parking will appear as points in a member’s Spot Club account and can be redeemed when making a reservation.” In order to redeem the points though, you have to click the ‘Redeem Points’ button on your account – it doesn’t seem to give you an option to redeem them when making a reservation if you’ve started at their home page.
The partnership between The Parking Spot and Capital One Business Deals also promises 15% off, so I decided to test that first. The first search I did was for a five day parking stay at Orlando airport (MCO) from February 16-21. Side note: when searching for an airport, you need to type in the city name – typing the airport code doesn’t work. I tried entering MCO and nothing came up, but when I started typing ‘Orlando’ it was displayed.
I then did an identical search in incognito mode without registering for an account with The Parking Spot to see what an unregistered new customer would be quoted. Both results can be found below – the Capital One Business Deals pricing is on the left, the guest account is on the right.
Although the Capital One pricing looks cheaper, the total amount due is a little misleading. When registering for a free account with The Parking Spot, the $5.95 reservation fee is waived – even if you haven’t registered via Capital One. If I’d created an account in incognito mode, that total price would’ve been $60.11, so Capital One would’ve only saved me $1.18 which is less than 15%. It seems like a decent-sized discount is available when choosing to Pay Now rather than Pay Later, with Capital One Business Deals members getting a small extra discount, but not as high as 15%.
Testing out the two free nights of parking was more successful. When clicking through to redeem the points and doing a search at MCO for those same dates, the 740 points were applied and $35.74 would be due for the remaining three days. That means the points for two free nights saved $23.19 based on what the cash price would’ve been for those five nights.
Something else to be aware of is that the number of points you have to redeem seems to vary depending on which kind of parking package you select. For example, at MCO The Parking Spot offers Premium Covered, Covered and Uncovered self-parking. It was 370 points per night for Uncovered self-parking which meant I could redeem my 740 points for two nights. However, if I wanted to choose Covered self-parking the price was 525 points per night which would’ve only covered one night.
The Parking Spot is available on some shopping portals. To earn the points for two free parking nights, you’ll initially have to click through from Capital One Business Deals. Once you’ve done that though, clicking through from a shopping portal before booking some kind of paid stay should earn you cashback; here are the current portal rates.
At the time of publishing this, Capital One Business Deals is listing this offer as expiring on February 1, 2023. That’s just for earning the points for registering; once you’ve received them, they’ll be valid for 18 months after which time they’ll expire unless you either earn or redeem some points, so it’s not like it’s only valid on parking stays up until February 1. Hopefully the partnership gets renewed beyond then, but it’d be worth registering now just in case if you think you could make use of two free nights of parking at a participating airport in the next 1.5 years.
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Looks like this doesn’t work for existing accounts. But signing P2 up for a new account with parking location set to LAX sure did provide 1570 points!!
Also available through AAA (with an expiration date further out) for those with it: https://discounts.aaa.com/travel-discounts/parking-spot
thanks for the find !! just used it
When I singed up using the steps you mentioned, I got 1260 points, but it still shows 2 free days. When I try a dummy booking at MCO, I can get up to 3 days off based on uncovered lot and prepaid rate. I wonder why I was awarded more points for sign-up that you got. The only differentiator could be the primary location and the zip code. I live in California but chose EWR as my primary location.
I think my theory is correct. 1260 is the # of points you need for 2 free days at EWR. But because parking rates vary across airports, those points get me more free days at MCO. so I guess the trick is to use EWR or other expensive airport locations as your primary location when you sign-up and then use those points at your actual home airports for more free days!
LAX requires 1500+ points for two free days, so perhaps that your home airport.
Great find! I’ll add that to the post.
Confirming that LAX indeed earns you 1570 points. I had my wife sign-up for an account to test this out 🙂
Thanks Stephen – we’ve been using Parking Spot for years but I’d never searched them on a portal! Thanks for sharing that nugget!
Thank you for this post, perfect timing for a week of parking planned at MCO next week!