This is a paid review
I’ve been asked to review a service named Parking London. What this service does is two things, really. Firstly, it allows owners of garages and parking spaces in London to offer their spots to others. A location can be specified, with a small description. Of course, the price for the monthly tenancy or sale is added.
The service doesn’t look very special at a first glance. Just a listing of available parking spots in London. When I took a closer look, I noticed a link “Map view”. When I clicked it, a Google map popped up of the UK, and I was able to zoom in and see where all the available parking spaces where. Hovering over the pin points shows the monthly cost for them. Great!
Being a good reviewer, I setup a scenario where I was a potential buyer who’s looking for garage space in London. I have a budget of 250 pounds a month, and I want the garage to be in the north of the river Thames.
This proved very difficult indeed. With a service like this, I expect to be able to specify some search criteria. I can enter a ‘filter’ parameter, but this didn’t seem to do anything useful.
There is an option, however to search for locations and postcodes. I gave it a try, but again, I found the results next to useless to me.
I left the location issues for what they were, and focussed on the pricing. I’m not sure what a reasonable price for a garage is, but I set myself an imaginary budget of 250 pounds. I was not able to find any way to select items by price, or sort the listing by price to simplify my search.
In my opinion, this service is really basic. A lot of time went into making the Google map work correctly, and it really does. It’s easy to locate a parking space near a location you want.
Finding items with a certain pricing, or any other form of search was pretty much impossible. With a little work, this site might be a very useful tool for garage-seeking Londoners.