How one of London’s major transport operators turned low-occupancy city sites into high-performing revenue assets.

When Naveed Khalique, Senior Commercial Manager at London St. Pancras High Speed (HS1), took stock of the car parks he’d inherited, the picture at the city sites wasn’t pretty. Occupancy at Stratford — a vast, 850-space facility next to one of East London’s busiest transport interchanges — sat at just 8%.

Today, that figure is 70%. And on event days, the car park has generated up to hundreds of thousands of pounds since the inception of Just Park.

The story of how HS1 got there is one about rethinking what a transport car park can be — and who it can serve.

The Challenge: Great Locations, Low Demand

HS1 operates around 8,500 spaces across its estate, spanning St. Pancras International, Stratford International, Ebbsfleet, and Ashford. The commuter sites — Ebbsfleet and Ashford — had never really been a problem. Demand was steady and predictable, anchored by the daily rhythm of train travel.

The city sites were a different story. St. Pancras, by its nature, generates short, sharp parking sessions dominated by chauffeurs and pick-ups rather than all-day parkers. And Stratford, despite sitting at the gateway to the Olympic Park and adjacent to Westfield — one of Europe’s largest urban shopping centres — was barely being used.

Part of the problem was structural. “I’m not allowed to market Stratford directly because of a planning constraint,” explains Naveed. “So I needed to look for ways to get awareness without us doing the marketing ourselves.” The answer was to put the spaces in front of an audience that was already looking.

Choosing JustPark: Marketplace Reach Without the Risk

Naveed spoke with several parking aggregators before committing. What ultimately tipped the balance toward JustPark came down to two things: the technology, and trust.

On the technology side, JustPark’s management platform — Luna — stood out immediately.

“It was so easy and user-friendly for someone like me,” he says. “I don’t have the time — I just need to click the button, check what’s going on.”

For a commercial manager juggling multiple priorities across a large estate, the simplicity of monitoring bookings, forward demand, and revenue at a glance was genuinely differentiating.

On trust, there was a broader industry concern at the time that parking marketplaces might evolve into operators — blurring the line between partner and competitor. JustPark’s commitment to remaining a technology and marketplace partner, rather than moving into operations, mattered to a business like HS1.

“The feel was that JustPark were going to follow suit,” Naveed recalls. “But you’ve never had any inclination to want to become an operator. That matters.”

The commission model also made commercial sense. With a planning constraint preventing direct marketing at Stratford, paying for access to JustPark’s 13 million drivers was the only practical way to build awareness. “Let JustPark’s audience find us instead,” as Naveed puts it.

The Turning Point: Event Parking at Stratford

HS1 initially listed just 50 spaces at Stratford on JustPark Reservations — the pre-book product that lets drivers find, reserve, and pay for parking in advance. Progress was steady but unspectacular until the team hit on what would change the trajectory entirely: event-specific pricing.

Stratford sits at the heart of one of London’s densest event ecosystems. The London Stadium — home to West Ham and a major concert venue — is minutes away. On regular days, Stratford spaces are priced at £9.50. On event days, that rises to £28.75.

“The big growth was purely driven by putting event pricing in,” says Vicky, Naveed’s JustPark account manager.

The impact was immediate. The car park now sells 150 spaces on an average non-event weekend day. On high-demand event days, it generates thousands of pounds in incremental income through this strategic partnership.

Iron Maiden was the biggest single selling day on the event tariff. A Burna Boy concert was even more extraordinary — demand was so intense that people turned up looking to set up food stalls in the car park.

The allocation has grown in lockstep with performance. From 50 spaces at launch, HS1 now lists 200 spaces at Stratford through JustPark — a fourfold increase driven entirely by proven demand.

A Layer on Top, Not a Replacement

One of the things that made JustPark Reservations easy for HS1 to adopt is that it sits alongside existing operations rather than replacing them. Each site already had on-demand and drive-up traffic handled through their car park operator. JustPark Reservations simply added a pre-book channel on top — capturing a segment of demand that wasn’t being reached at all.

The dynamic plays out differently across the estate. At Stratford, pre-book is now a primary driver, particularly for events, where planners want to lock in their space days in advance. At St. Pancras, the balance is different: the site is dominated by short, high-turnover sessions — chauffeurs, quick pick-ups, city workers — and pre-booking plays a more supplementary role, capturing visitors who don’t know the area and want certainty before they travel.

“Yours is more supplementary at Pancras,” Naveed explains. “Someone doesn’t know the area, there’s a car park here, prepay. But the general customer — they just turn up.” That flexibility is the point. JustPark Reservations doesn’t require operators to overhaul how they run their car parks. It layers incremental, pre-booked revenue on top of whatever on-demand infrastructure is already in place — whether that’s a PARCS provider, a barrier system, or a pay-on-foot machine.

Luna: Running a Large Estate on a Snapshot

Luna is JustPark’s management platform — a real-time dashboard that gives operators a centralised view of their JustPark performance: bookings, revenue, occupancy, and forward demand, all in one place. For operators managing multiple sites or a high volume of transactions, it removes the need to dig into spreadsheets or chase reports. Everything is visible at a glance.

For Naveed, it’s become a daily habit. With 8,500 spaces across four sites, he keeps his oversight lean — every morning, a quick check of Luna tells him where things stand. “I check it every day, just to see what’s going on,” he says. “If it’s broadly in line with what Saba are doing on the operator side, we’re going to have a good week.”

The forward-booking view is particularly valuable: seeing what’s already on the books a month ahead — especially for upcoming events — enables proactive pricing and operational decisions rather than reactive ones. The next step is integrating JustPark’s data directly into HS1’s Power BI dashboard, alongside data from their car park operator, to give a single holistic view of occupancy, dwell time, and revenue across all sources.

What’s Next: The Mobility Hub Vision

Stratford is a different conversation from the rest of the estate. From the roof of the car park, the cranes haven’t stopped. New residential towers, student accommodation, retail — the area is transforming. HS1 has already sold land for two more residential towers on the station’s eastern side, with more to follow.

“As long as that continues, we can grow the revenue,” Naveed says. “We should be able to fill that site more often than not this year, with a little bit of help from JustPark and events.”

The longer-term vision is bigger still. Stations like Stratford and St. Pancras are no longer just commuter hubs — they’re becoming mobility hubs: places where people eat, shop, swap between transport modes, and expect every element of the journey to be frictionless. For HS1, parking is no longer an afterthought in that vision. It’s one of the things that makes the experience work.

JustPark works with transport operators, commercial property owners, and venues of all sizes to unlock revenue from underutilised parking. With over 13 million drivers on the UK’s biggest parking marketplace, and products covering pre-book, on-demand, and real-time analytics, we have the tools to match any operation.