APH Airport Parking Review

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APH advertises Gatwick park and ride from £7.49 a day and Heathrow parking from £6.17, and its own Gatwick results page returned a cheapest park and ride of £93.89 for seven nights — £13.41 a day — when searched on 15 September 2026. Both figures come from APH's own airport pages on that date.

APH stands for Airport Parking and Hotels, and it has been doing exactly that since 1980. It owns and staffs its own car parks rather than only reselling other people's: around 7,000 spaces in total, roughly 300,000 cars a year, and a comparison table of more than 150 car parks, hotels and lounges for the airports where it does not. It is still a family firm, registered in Copthorne, West Sussex, and it has taken the British Travel Award for airport parking in each of the last 15 years.

The award that matters more is the independent one. In research published after fieldwork in March 2026, Which? made APH a Recommended Provider for park and ride with a customer score of 80%, ahead of every Gatwick and Manchester operator it tested bar one. There is no booking fee and no card charge on top of the quoted price.

A family firm that still answers to a family

Airport Parking and Hotels Limited was incorporated on 19 January 1981 under the name Airport Parking (Gatwick) Limited, and took its present name on 26 April 1996. The marketing says 1980, which is a year earlier than the register; the gap is the kind of thing that usually separates the start of trading from the date the paperwork was filed, and it is worth nothing more than a footnote.

Ownership runs through Crawley Down Holdings Limited (07123465), which has held 75% or more of the shares and voting rights, plus the right to appoint and remove directors, since 1 July 2016. Both companies sit at APH House, Snow Hill, Copthorne, Crawley RH10 3EQ — the same address the car park operates from.

The register also records a handover. Frederick James Caunter and Harry Nicholas Caunter were appointed directors on 25 June 2025, and Bertram George Voller and John William Voller ceased to be directors on 27 August 2025, with Frederick Caunter also taking over as company secretary. Nick Caunter, the managing director quoted when the Gatwick site won its security award in June 2023, remains in place. Accounts to 31 December 2024 were filed on 28 August 2025 and the next set is due by 30 September 2026; the filed accounts themselves could not be opened during this check, so no turnover or profit figure is quoted here.

Why any of this matters: almost every other name on APH's own results pages belongs to a group, a platform or a private-equity roll-up. An operator whose owner, directors and car park share one postcode is a genuinely different proposition, and it is checkable in about four minutes on the public register.

The 80% score, and who it beat

Which? surveyed 5,030 people about 8,121 separate parking experiences at Birmingham, Gatwick, Heathrow, Luton, Manchester, Stansted and other large UK airports, with fieldwork in March 2026. Four park and ride operators came out as Recommended Providers: Sentinel at Leeds Bradford on 86%, APH on 80%, Secure Airparks on 76%, and Cophall and Maple at Gatwick on 75%.

Two things follow that APH does not say out loud. The first is that its 80% is second of four, not first — a small regional operator at Leeds Bradford scored six points higher. The second is more useful to a reader choosing between the pages on this site: in the meet and greet half of the same research, Maple took 76% and Purple Parking 75%, and APH's own valet product does not appear among the recommended names at all. The park and ride is the rated product. The forecourt service is not.

The lowest scores in the study went to airport-operated car parks rather than independents, with Belfast International's long stay at 61%. That is the finding APH's marketing leans on hardest, and on this evidence it is fair: the airport's own car park is not automatically the safe choice.

What £7.49 a day becomes once you put dates in

APH's Gatwick page carries the line “Park from just £7.49 per day”; the Heathrow page says £6.17. Those are floors reached by booking many months out, and the distance between them and a real search is the single most useful number on this page.

Searched on 15 September 2026 for seven nights, APH's Gatwick results ran: Cophall Parking £93.89, APH's own Park and Ride £103.92, Airparks Park & Ride £103.92, Bubble Park & Deliver £105.50, Bubble meet and greet £126.00, Ace £128.00, I Love £130.00 and APH's own Meet & Greet Forecourt £135.75. The cheapest park and ride was therefore £13.41 a day, not £7.49, and it was not APH's.

Manchester tells the same story more sharply. APH's own Park and Ride there was £134.95 for the week and its Self Park £199.95, while Maple Park & Ride on the same page was £70.49 — a little over half the price, for a 20 to 25 minute transfer against APH's 10. At Heathrow, where APH owns nothing, its meet and greet was £137.90 against Edward Lloyd at £110.00 and Maple Express park and ride at £119.95.

An operator that lists a rival above its own product, on its own booking page, at its own airport, has given away the easiest sale it has. That is the strongest argument for using the site, and it costs nothing to verify: put your dates in and see which name is at the top.

Gatwick's own APH site is a 10 to 12 minute bus ride from either terminal, with buses every 10 to 15 minutes round the clock, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, more than 120 camera positions, barrier entry and floodlighting. It was the first airport park and ride in the UK to be given the Park Mark Plus security award, in June 2023, and Manchester has the same award; the scheme was renamed Safer Parking Plus on 1 April 2026 when the police-backed body took it over.

One banner, four sets of cancellation rules

The Gatwick landing page is titled “Free Cancellation” and says “free cancellation up to 24 hours before departure”. The booking conditions describe four different products, and only one of them behaves like that.

Non-Flexible bookings cannot be cancelled or amended at all and no money comes back. Semi-Flexible must be cancelled a stated number of days ahead. Flexible must be cancelled “24 hours before 00:01 on the booked arrival date”. Super-Flexible can be cancelled at any time up to the booked arrival time, which is what the APH Gatwick car park page describes.

The Flexible wording is the one to read twice. Because the clock runs from one minute past midnight on the day you arrive rather than from your arrival, a car booked in for 22:00 on a Friday has to be cancelled by 00:01 on the Thursday — 46 hours before the barrier, not 24. Read as “24 hours before departure”, as the banner puts it, a traveller would miss that deadline by most of two days and pay the full booking.

Three further terms sit alongside. Chargeable services begin 30 minutes before the booked arrival time, so a refund inside the window is of everything except those. Coming home early earns nothing back: there is no partial refund for collecting the car sooner than booked. And an amendment that changes the price is processed as a fresh booking with the original refunded, so the new price is whatever the site is charging that day.

The genuine good news is that none of this carries a fee. APH publishes no amendment charge and no booking charge, and no card surcharge appeared in the conditions. In a trade where a non-refundable card fee is close to standard, an operator that does not levy one deserves to be told so plainly.

What the company will not pay for once it has your keys

At the three car parks APH runs itself, it accepts responsibility for death or personal injury caused by its negligence, and for damage to paint and bodywork caused by its negligence where that damage is not already recorded on the inspection report. Everything else is carved out: minor scratches, dents and chips to paintwork; glass and windscreens unless negligence is proved; theft, vandalism, mechanical failure, terrorism and natural disaster; personal property left in the car or on the transfer bus; and indirect losses such as lost earnings.

Two conditions sit on the driver rather than the company, and both can be missed. The car must hold a current MOT certificate valid for the whole parking period, and vehicle excise duty must be paid for the whole period too — so a trip that straddles an MOT expiry date is a breach of the contract you have just signed. Keys are left with the car park unless Self Park is booked, steering wheel locks and other manual security devices are not allowed, and house keys must come off the ring.

Damage has to be reported before you drive off the site, and APH must be allowed to inspect before any repair. That is a normal enough condition, but it is paired with one that is not: a Vehicle Inspection Report recording the marks already on the car, which is the document the exclusion above turns on, costs £5. Charging for the evidence that decides a later claim sits awkwardly beside “no hidden fees”, even at that price.

Height limits differ by product and are easy to trip over. The Gatwick park and ride takes vehicles up to 2.4 metres and no trailers; the Gatwick meet and greet takes 2 metres, or six feet six inches. A roof box or a tall van can be fine for one product and refused at the other, at the same airport, on the same booking.

Principal at three airports, booking agent at everywhere else

The conditions split cleanly in two, and the split decides who a complaint goes to. At the car parks APH owns and operates — named in the terms as Gatwick, Manchester and Cardiff — APH is the principal: its staff take the keys, its contract governs, and its liability wording applies. Everywhere else, including every Heathrow product and the hotels and lounges, “APH acts as a booking agent for the relevant service provider and does not operate”, its own liability runs only to negligence in processing the booking, and claims must go “directly to the relevant service provider”, whose contact details APH supplies on request while stating it cannot guarantee the outcome.

Vehicles at those third-party sites are parked at the owner's risk, and the operator accepts no responsibility for theft, loss or damage unless negligence is proved. In practice a customer who books a Heathrow meet and greet through APH and finds a dent has bought from APH and must claim from a company they have never dealt with.

One detail could not be settled and should be checked before booking in Wales. The terms list Cardiff among APH's own car parks, while APH's Cardiff page describes the site as operated through its partner network. Those two statements are both APH's and they point at different contracts. Ask which applies before you hand over keys there.

The trade body registered at APH's own address

Airport parking has no financial regulator, no ombudsman and no statutory compensation scheme. What stands in their place is the Independent Airport Parking Association, which has 14 member companies and a ten-point code of conduct. Members must use land authorised for airport parking, run courtesy transport with qualified drivers, have transport “normally available within 20 minutes” of arrival and customs clearance, keep insurance and fire precautions, and hold a clear procedure for complaints, cancellations and refunds, with the limits of their liability given to the customer in writing at or shortly after booking.

That twenty-minute figure is the only hard number in the code, and APH clears it comfortably: 10 to 12 minutes at Gatwick, 10 at Manchester, 5 to 7 at Cardiff. The rest of the code asks members to have procedures rather than to meet standards, and there is no external audit, no assessor and no published sanction behind it.

There is also an awkwardness worth stating. The association's contact address is given as care of APH, Snow Hill, Copthorne, West Sussex RH10 3EQ — the member's own building. A trade body run from one member's offices is common enough in small industries, and it is not evidence of anything improper, but it does mean the code should be read as an industry undertaking rather than as independent oversight.

APH's own complaints procedure is published and dated, which is more than several of its rivals manage: receipt acknowledged within five working days, a written decision aimed at within 30 days, and a phone line on 01342 645062. After that the route is the county court, under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 duty to carry out a service with reasonable care and skill and the old law of bailment that applies from the moment a member of staff takes the keys. No ombudsman will look at it and no scheme will pay if the operator fails.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 15 September 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.