The P Card turns 15: Service in debit card format

For 15 years now, the P Card has enabled its users to park in Contipark parking facilities without tickets or cash. Drivers have access to over 450 of the company’s car parks, underground garages and parking lots in more than 200 cities. In addition, it offers them discounted parking rates. Customers manage their contract data independently in their online customer account at www.mein-contipark.de. The individual parking transactions can also be viewed there. More than 460,000 customers in Germany now use the P Card. The goal is to reach the half-million P Card customer mark in Germany before the end of this year. Since the beginning of 2023, the P Card will also be gradually replaced by the Pcard+. This will enable numerous new services in the future.

Before Contipark rolled out the P Card throughout Germany, the company started its new offer 15 years ago with a test run initially limited to Berlin. In order to bring the new product to the market, a service company was founded, the “Servipark Deutschland GmbH”, following the example of the Belgian owner. Therefore, the P Card started under the name “Servipark customer card” and was distributed to the parking customers by Contipark employees and hostesses. But in the beginning, the demand was manageable.

This changed with an expansion of the P Card service. In 2009, Contipark introduced discounted rates for P Card customers in numerous parking facilities. In addition to credit card payment, direct debit was introduced as a second means of payment. At the same time, the further rollout took place in Hamburg, Düsseldorf and many other cities in Germany. As a result of these measures, the number of new registrations for the P Card service increased significantly. For a uniform appearance with the customer card of the same name of the Belgian parent company Interparking, the customer card was renamed “P Card”.

As an extension of the P Card, Contipark launched the DB BahnPark app in 2017 together with DB BahnPark GmbH, Contipark’s joint venture with Deutsche Bahn. This app enables P Card customers to digitally pay for their parking ticket at all parking spaces managed by Contipark without a barrier system and to extend it on the go if necessary.

The idea of a customer card for parking originally came from the Belgian parent company of the company and resulted from the intention to simplify the parking process for customers. Contipark adapted this idea and further expanded the services associated with the P Card. In doing so, the company took on a pioneering role in the German parking market, where a comparable product did not exist at the time.

The P Card has also been available in Austria since 2016 and has over 60,000 users there.