Towne Park recently launched its brand evolution to Towne as the company positioned itself as an arrival-through-departure experience partner. Additionally, the launch of Nexity by Towne provides a fully integrated solution that consolidates parking access, payment, data, and revenue optimization into a single platform. Towne Chief Executive Officer Andrew Kerin recently discussed with LODGING the company’s brand evolution, the launch of Nexity, and how parking can be a significant contributor to hotels’ profitability.
What does Towne Park’s rebranding to Towne represent in terms of how the company sees its role in the hotel guest journey today? Why is now the right moment to make this change?
The evolution to Towne reflects our role as a fully integrated hospitality, parking, and mobility partner, positively shaping the arrival-through-departure experience. Towne is a clearer articulation of the role we play and the value we deliver for the brands we serve, hotel owners, hotel management companies, and their guests.
We are often responsible for guests’ first and last impression of a property. As mobile key adoption grows, our associates may be the primary person that interacts with a guest at a hotel. That puts us in an integral role as it relates to guest satisfaction, brand perception, and loyalty. The evolution to Towne reflects our approach in bringing hospitality, operations, and technology together to deliver a seamless arrival-through-departure experience, all aligned with the hotel brand while optimizing their parking asset.
By supporting the entire arrival-through-departure experience through a single, integrated platform of service and technology, we can create greater operational efficiency and performance, increase revenue, improve margin, and elevate the guest experience, impacting overall asset value for owners.
Hotels are facing relatively flat occupancy and modest RevPAR growth projections for 2026. How does that economic environment push operators to rethink assets like parking that haven’t been fully optimized?
When speaking with our clients, the focus has been on driving revenue and optimizing every aspect of the hotel environment—ancillary services like F&B, events, spa, and parking—that, in addition to rooms, deliver revenue and profitability for hotels. Some in the industry are starting to look at revenue per available guest (RevPAG) to better capture the full landscape of revenue-generating services at hotels—rooms and ancillary services.
Parking is a high-margin ancillary revenue source for hotels. When parking is actively managed with the application of many of the same principles hotels apply to room rates (dynamic pricing, e-commerce to sell available inventory), it can be a difference-maker. At Towne, we use our proprietary technology, AI-based dynamic pricing, and Smart Aggregation to sell available inventory across more than 15 channels, like Waze, Google, Park Whiz, etc., to optimize yield and revenue. When parking operations are fully optimized, we see a greater than 60 percent margin, and it’s a meaningful contributor to the overall revenue profile at a hotel.
With the launch of Nexity by Towne, what operational challenges are you trying to solve for hotel owners that existing parking systems haven’t addressed?
Nexity by Towne is the only fully integrated solution that brings together parking access, payment, guidance, revenue optimization, and enforcement in a data-centric cloud-based platform. It enables real-time decision-making, greater operational control, and more effective revenue optimization.
The technology was built for the future and for reliability. Our platform already embeds new technology, like AI and laser remote sensing technology (LiDAR), and with an open API, it’s integration-ready for ride share, autonomous vehicles, and whatever may come next.
The team also designed the physical infrastructure and hardware for durability and uptime. Our retractable gate technology minimizes gate downtime due to equipment failure, which reduces guest friction, lost revenue, and operating and capital costs.
How can hotel owners benefit from using Nexity by Towne?
Nexity by Towne delivers value for hotel owners in three ways. First, it tackles operational inefficiency and fragmentation. Many hotels rely on a mix of disconnected systems and manual processes, which create friction for both staff and guests. Nexity brings these elements together into a single, integrated platform that not only creates a better experience but simplifies the end-to-end management of the system.
Second, it improves reliability and addresses maintenance challenges. When parking equipment goes down, this leads to guest frustration, operational disruption, increased labor costs, and revenue leakage. Nexity’s modern, durable hardware and advanced technology reduce downtime, enable faster recovery if an issue occurs, and lower maintenance expenses. Our team re-engineered the gate design to swing out and incorporated auto-reset functionality and advanced LPR technology, so if accidentally hit, the gate resets automatically.
When the gate remains in operation, the hotel collects all revenue; they don’t have to staff a gate or pay for maintenance, which reduces costs. Guests have a better experience because there’s no ticket, and they’re not waiting to pay or to enter or exit, so they have a frictionless experience.
Third, it drives long-term asset value through reliability and data. With a longer lifespan than traditional systems, Nexity lowers capital and maintenance costs over time. It also has one integrated data platform and embedded revenue optimization technology that supports demand generation and dynamic pricing while also giving owners real-time visibility across their portfolio.
