Airport Parking Shop Review

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The cheapest tile on Airport Parking Shop's Manchester page on 24 September 2026 was Avian Parking All Inclusive at £4.82 a day, with a ten to twenty minute transfer. Gatwick opened at £7.20 and Heathrow at £7.60. All three came off the site's own airport pages that afternoon, and each is a daily equivalent of a week's parking rather than a rate you pay by the day.

The site has been doing this since 2003, which makes it one of the older price engines in British travel, and it is unusually large for its age: "An amazing 660 car parks across 32 airports", from Heathrow and Gatwick through Inverness, Norwich and Teesside to Belfast City, Dublin, Shannon and the Dover ferry terminal. It is run by Fubra Limited, an internet publisher in Aldershot incorporated on 7 April 2000 and still on the register as company 03967214, and the search itself is Fubra's own code rather than a widget bought in.

What makes it different from the rest of this trade is what it is comparing. Most parking sites rank car parks. This one ranks the eight booking companies that sell car parks — APH, BCP, Essential Travel, FHR, Holiday Extras, Park and Go, Purple Parking and SkyParkSecure — and shows their prices for the same car park side by side. It takes no money itself. Your card goes to whichever of the eight you clicked through to, your confirmation email comes from them, and if the barrier will not lift at six in the morning they are the number on the voucher. Knowing that before you book decides who you ring.

The eight names behind the results

Type a date into any airport page and the ladder that comes back is assembled from eight wholesalers. The FAQ lists them plainly — "APH, BCP, Essential Travel, Holiday Extras, FHR, Park and Go, Purple Parking & Skyparksecure" — and the homepage repeats the eight under the heading "8 Parking Providers". That is the whole product. Each of those firms has its own inventory, its own deals with the car parks and its own price for the same tarmac, and putting the eight in one column is a job none of them will do for you.

Two of the eight are the same business. Holiday Extras bought Purple Parking's brand and website in November 2017 and the Purple Parking privacy policy has said so ever since, so a reader comparing those two rows is comparing two price lists from one Kent company rather than two competitors. That is not concealment — both names are correct and the prices genuinely differ — but it thins the field by one, and nothing on Airport Parking Shop mentions it.

The discrepancy worth knowing is smaller and stranger. The terms and conditions, which are the document that governs what you are agreeing to, say the site searches "7 of the largest parking brokers in the UK: APH, BCP, Essential Travel, FHR, Holiday Extras, Park and Go and Purple Parking". SkyParkSecure is missing from that sentence and present everywhere else, including the cookie policy, which lists a Cloudflare cookie set on www.SkyParkSecure.com. Eight is the live number; seven is what the contract page still says. Worth asking about if a SkyParkSecure booking goes wrong, because the cancellation terms for it are the outlier of the set.

What the price on the tile actually is

Every listing carries a per-day figure before you have entered anything, and the small print under the Gatwick and Heathrow ladders explains exactly how it is built: "The lowest price recorded in the past week for a week's parking, divided by 7 to show the daily equivalent." So the number is a historic floor, not an offer. It is the best price anyone was shown for a seven-night stay in the previous seven days, spread across the days. Change your dates to a half-term Friday and it will not be that.

That is a fairer way of advertising than a bare "from" price, because it is a price somebody actually got rather than a rate that exists once a year. It is still not your price, and the site does not say so in those words. Treat the ladder as a ranking — which broker is cheapest for which car park — and read the real number after the dates go in.

The ranking is where the site earns its place. At Gatwick on 24 September 2026 the top of the list was The Gatwick Valet Parking Company at £7.20 a day on-airport, then Gatwick Noble Parking meet and greet at £7.22, AVPS park and ride at £8.09 and Gatwick Airparks at £10.38 with a twelve-minute transfer. Cophall came in at £11.61, Purple Parking's own Gatwick site at £11.74 and APH at £13.82 — the two best-known names in the trade sitting sixth and eighth on a list built by a company with no stake in either.

Heathrow ran from Heathrow Car Park Ltd at £7.60 a day with a ten to fifteen minute transfer, through ParkInn meet and greet at £9.41 and Purple Parking's Terminal 5 park and ride at £10.75, up to MBW meet and greet at £15.63. Manchester was the cheapest of the three airports by a distance: Avian at £4.82, Vacationcare premium self-park at £5.06, Red Rose park and ride at £5.16, Hunters at £6.34 with an eight-minute transfer, and the airport's own JetParks Ringway at £7.91. A week at Avian is roughly £34; the same week at the airport's own Drop & Go P16, at £9.94 a day, is nearer £70.

The cancellation table nobody links to from the booking page

The single most useful document on the site is buried in the footer under "Amend / Cancel", and it sets out what each of the eight charges to change or scrap a booking. Nothing else in this trade publishes the comparison, because nobody else has eight sets of terms to compare.

APH takes nothing for a cancellation made more than 24 hours before arrival, and nothing for an amendment; inside 24 hours there is no refund. BCP, Essential Travel, Holiday Extras and Purple Parking all run to 23:59 on the day before departure and charge £10.50 on parking and lounge bookings, £15 on hotels. FHR charges £10.00 per reservation with 24 hours' notice. Park and Go charges £7.50, and an amendment inside 24 hours costs "£7.50 or 50% of the cost of parking (whichever is smaller)". SkyParkSecure is the one to watch: its deadline is 72 hours rather than 24, the fee is £10.00, and it is the only one of the eight that charges for an amendment at all — £5.00, even with more than a day's notice.

Set that beside the general terms and conditions, which say flatly: "All cancellations are subject to a cancellation fee of £10.50 for car park and lounge bookings and £15 for hotel bookings." Both are the same company's words on the same site, and they cannot both be right — a cancelled APH booking is free and a SkyParkSecure one has to be cancelled three days out. Work to whichever of the two documents is worse for you and you will not be caught out. Promotional rates, super savers and anything sold as non-flexible cannot be cancelled at all, which is the usual rule in this trade and the reason the cheapest tile is not always the one to buy.

Who is actually on the hook when the car park lets you down

There is no financial regulator here. Airport parking is not a regulated activity, so there is no FCA permission to look up, no firm reference number, no Financial Ombudsman Service and no compensation scheme — and this site is a step further back again, because it is not even the party you pay. Its terms disclaim the data itself: "We do not guarantee the accuracy of the information and accept no liability for any error or omission", with the reader made responsible for reading everything before travelling.

In practice that leaves three parties and a clear order. The car park owes you reasonable care and skill under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, and from the moment a member of staff takes your keys it is holding your car as a bailee, which is an older and in some ways stronger duty. The broker — whichever of the eight took the payment — owes you the booking it sold and handles the refund. Airport Parking Shop sits outside both, which is why its own FAQ tells you to take a complaint about a car park "directly" to the provider rather than to itself.

It does answer the phone, though, which several larger sites in this trade no longer do. The number is 01252 367 200, staffed Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, with booking@airport-parking-shop.co.uk for email and a self-service portal for resending a voucher. The terms add that cancellation requests by phone or email are not accepted outside those hours, so a Sunday-morning change of plan before a Monday departure has to go through the portal or wait — and waiting can cost the whole fare.

A twenty-six-year-old publisher, and the question its own terms never answer

Fubra Limited was incorporated on 7 April 2000 and registered for VAT as 733667024. Its filed purpose is SIC 63990, "other information service activities not elsewhere classified", which is the register's way of saying it publishes websites. Alongside this one it runs an airport guides network and AffJet, a dashboard that pulls a publisher's earnings together from, in its own words, "over 100 affiliate networks". Accounts were last made up to 30 September 2025, with the next set due by 30 June 2027.

The people have been stable for five years. Joanne Elizabeth Gutteridge and Thomas Hamilton Nunn were appointed directors on 22 and 23 June 2021, and Dr Paul Martin McCormick — a director from 2011 to 2021 — came back on 26 September 2022. The only person with significant control is Brendan McLoughlin, notified on 6 April 2016 as holding more than 25% but not more than 50% of the shares. Twelve officers have come and gone since 2000, which for a company of this age is an ordinary number.

One administrative snag is worth a footnote. The registered office is c/o Rock Tax & Accounting, Elm House, Tanshire Park, Shackleford Road, Elstead, Godalming GU8 6LB. The terms and conditions give the same building under a different accountancy name, "C/O Chamberlains" — the sort of thing that happens when a firm rebrands and a footer does not follow. Same address, older label.

The question the site never answers is how it is paid. The about page says "We are truly independent, not affiliated with or owned by any one particular brand", which is a statement about ownership and is true: Fubra is not a subsidiary of any of the eight. It is not a statement about money, and there is no page anywhere on the site explaining what the eight brokers pay when a reader clicks through. Given what AffJet does for a living, commission is the obvious inference — but it is an inference, and it should be confirmed with Fubra rather than assumed. A line disclosing it would cost the site nothing and would settle the point.

Eighty thousand reviews, and how much to trust them

The site has collected more than 80,000 car park reviews from its own customers, and they are attached to individual car parks rather than to the site — which is the useful way round. Cophall at Gatwick carries 4.5 stars from 1,133 people, Purple Parking's Gatwick site 4.0 from 665, APH Gatwick 4.5 from 779 and Heathrow's 5 Star meet and greet 4.5 from 587. They are gathered by an email after the trip, scored one to five, and the published policy promises that "We will not exclude a comment if it contains negative feedback on a service". It keeps that promise visibly: Manchester JetParks Ringway sits at 2.0 stars from 63 reviews and Purple Parking's Heathrow meet and greet at 3.0 from 48, both still listed and sold.

Three things temper them. Reviewers are entered into a competition, and the policy's own sanction for breaking the rules is that a comment "will not be published and they will be refused entry into our competition" — an incentive that tends to lift averages a little wherever it is used. The policy does not say how the star average is calculated, whether old scores drop out, or how long a review stays up, so a 4.5 could be last month's or a decade's worth. And the counts are wildly uneven: Maple Parking at Heathrow shows 3.5 stars from two reviews, which is not a rating at all. Read the number of reviews before the number of stars, and ignore anything under about fifty.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 24 September 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.