A fine of hundreds of pounds or a damaged car will quickly sour your return home from a holiday. With official airport meet-and-greet options costing up to £300 for four days of parking, UK travellers are turning to unofficial long-stay car parks and cheap but poorly rated meet-and-greet services at airports.
Hundreds of passengers flying from Stansted have used a car park known as New Farm, in the Essex village of Elsenham. Among them, they have experienced damage to their cars, chaotic transport between the airport and the car park, and long waits to collect their vehicles. The local council has issued an enforcement notice for the site to be shut down. New Farm may seem like an outlier. In less than a year, the site changed from agricultural land to a car park for more than a thousand vehicles, according to the BBC.
Yet passengers at airports across the UK, and with both unauthorised and legitimate meet-and-greet services, have reported poor service. This service has resulted in fines from airport car parks in which vehicles were parked by meet-and-greet services, without customers’ knowledge, loss and damage to property, and families waiting hours to be picked up from terminals.
Shorts
