Wilson Parking
The new Wilson Parking app lets customers streamline the process of finding, booking and managing parking.
Formed by digital product designer Kombu and built by Adapptor, the app combines the functionality of Wilson’s Book a Bay service and Wilson One memberships to create a powerful app that can do it all. Users are able to view promotions, search for the most convenient parking location, pre-book their bay, manage any changes that may arise and then book it all again with simplicity and ease.
Leveraging React Native for rapid iteration
Built with React Native, the same cross-platform technology used to build Facebook, the development primarily used Typescript, a language that enables rapid iteration without sacrificing the safety and robustness of native languages such as Kotlin or Swift.
The APIs were built with Swagger Tools, and backend integration with booking and payment services were developed in conjunction with the talented teams at WilsonIT and ADVAM.
Building a great product
The app was officially launched on October 2018 and fast became customers preferred method to book parking. To capitalise on the success Wilson invested in a range of new features throughout 2019 and 2020.
To cater for organisations that want to provide parking discounts to staff members, Wilson added Business Accounts. Linking a business account in the app provided access to products exclusively available to a parker’s employer. Now people could use the one app to pay for personal parking, and parking provided by their employer.
Apple Pay & Parking Perks
Apple Pay was added as a payment method in 2020. To make sure this was as seamless as possible for customers, the Adapptor team worked closely with Wilson and ADVAM to ensure that customers could access a car park with their phone; no card, no ticket needed.
To top off 2020, Wilson also added Perks, a way to reward their regular customers. If someone books and parks 5 times in a month using the app they were rewarded with $5 off their next booking.
All this resulted in a 450,000 total downloads over the two years to 2020, with a 4.8 star rating (out of 5) in the App Store based on over 13,000 reviews.
