Connect Cashless Parking

I’ve been using the APCOA CONNECT parking app for quite a while to pay for parking at a local train station. This cashless parking app looks very similar and seems to share account details with the APCOA CONNECT app. I had to download this cashless parking app today to pay for a parking space at Waitrose. I realised that this app shares account details with the APCOA CONNECT app (I was warned that I already had an account when I tried to register with the cashless parking app for the first time!). They’re not exactly the same apps because this cashless app lists the train station parking space but the APCOA app doesn’t list the Waitrose parking space! I should also mention that I couldn’t pay with a credit card on this cashless parking app. It generated a “merchant error” message. I mentioned it to a friend who also uses this app. She stated that credit cards don’t work so you need to use the Apple Pay option instead. What’s going on?

Hand down the worst parking app I have used. Close to the worst app I have used for anything actually. The sign up process is absolutely terrible. Makes you confirm everything twice, I assume because someone thought that would be a good idea, but doesn’t have any support for a password manager or even allow the pasting of your password into the confirm field. End result… a secure password is a nightmare to sign up with. Once into this distorted, pixelated 10 year old looking app, you have to enter your card details before you are able to pay with Apple Pay?!? To finish you off, you have to pay an extra 20p on top of you parking as a “convenience fee”…lol. Not sure how I feel about an app like this storing my card details to be honest, they are probably on some google sheet somewhere, or better yet, written on a post it note, stuck on some product manager’s computer screen.

Ok so this is the latest iteration of Connect Cashless Parking. The early ones where pretty buggy but this has been bang on. Easy to set up and literally takes about 1m to book parking at my station. Has geographic location so it will find your nearest compatible but you will have to disconnect any vpn software you might be using as it interferes with it. Aside from that it’s a good app.