Parking was among the industries hit hardest at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. And Chicago-based SpotHero, one of the leading parking reservations apps, was no exception.
SpotHero's bookings dropped 90% in April 2020 compared to February 2020, just before the pandemic started.
The company went through multiple rounds of layoffs, ultimately cutting its workforce in half as the pandemic continued to keep workers, students and travelers in their homes and off the roads.
But SpotHero's business began to bounce back as vaccines rolled out, companies slowly returned workers to the office, and travelers hit the road once again.
Its revenue in 2021 approximately doubled compared in 2020, with reservations increasing 72% year-over-year. The company hired almost 90 employees last year, bringing its headcount to 205, just a dozen employees short of its pre-pandemic total.
SpotHero declined to share specifics on its pre-pandemic revenues.
And despite Covid variants and other curveballs the pandemic has thrown, some cities saw parking surpass pre-Covid levels, SpotHero CEO Mark Lawrence told Chicago Inno. Last year, cities like Boston and New York saw usage on SpotHero increase to levels higher than prior to the pandemic, while others like San Francisco and Washington, D.C., have yet to reach their pre-Covid highs.
"We were able to navigate through the tough times and are now past pre-Covid records on many fronts," Lawrence said.
SpotHero is planning for more growth in 2022, including new hires across all of its department, but especially on its engineering team, Lawrence said.
One of its most recent new executive hires is Karen Bartuch, a former Amazon executive who most recently served as head of brand marketing for the e-commerce giant. She's now SpotHero's VP of brand marketing, where she's tasked with telling SpotHero's story to consumers who are ready to hit the road again.
"The parking industry’s sort of on its heels right now," she said. "Things are constantly changing. We're constantly having to evolve as an organization."
That evolution means thinking about ways SpotHero can prepare itself for the future of transit, whether that means accommodating driverless cars, electric scooters, or additional use cases for its customers.
"Yes, we do parking today. But what’s the next adjacent opportunity to help our customers?" Bartuch said. "And how can we innovate? Instead just dialing the dial up one or two clicks, we can really evolve into something bigger that people aren’t even thinking about."
Some pandemic-related shifts in how we get around could be advantageous to SpotHero, like commuters who are more comfortable driving to work than riding in a crowded bus or train, for example. The company is currently running customer surveys to answer some of those exact questions.
"Our customer at the end of the day is anyone who drives a vehicle," Bartuch said. "I would say anything is on the table to serve those customers."
SpotHero, founded in 2011 with $120 million in total venture funding, says it's approaching $1 billion in parking sold this year. It's helped park more than 40 million cars to date.
