'Hidden' Parking Charges At Manningtree

A reminder to passengers of the potential hidden costs when buying a ticket to park at Manningtree station. If you elect to buy your ticket via mobile phone there is an additional charge of 30p on top of the already extortionate £6.20 daily cost. There is then the option to receive a text message confirming your booking but this will cost another 10p.

The system used to take these 'phone bookings is fully automated and is based on speech recognition. However, there are a number of reports that this system is very unreliable and requests often have to be repeated a number of times thereby lengthening the call, for which of course the customer is paying.

National Express East Anglia outsource their car parks to NCP who in turn appear to outsource the mobile phone element of the ticketing to RingGo Parking. All these companies presumably want to make a profit on the arrangement, hence the ridiculous charges.