Airport Meet and Greet Parking Lost Its Safety Badge After Cars Were Left in Fields

Jill Gale booked a last-minute flight to Montenegro from Bristol Airport for her husband’s birthday and paid a meet and greet firm to look after her car while she was away. She came home to a £600 repair bill for a dented rear bumper and scratched paintwork the company will not explain or pay for.

Gale is not an isolated case. North Somerset Council’s leadership has issued a public warning after a run of complaints about meet and greet operators near Bristol Airport, describing vehicles returned with damage, unexplained mileage racked up on the odometer, and holidaymakers left stranded when a company simply failed to turn up.

The Business Model That Makes This Possible

Meet and greet parking works by having a driver take your car from the terminal drop-off point and store it somewhere off-site until you land, saving you a walk from a distant long-stay car park. It relies entirely on trust: you hand over your keys to a stranger and have no way to check where your car actually goes or who drives it while you are away. For a family heading off on a two-week holiday, that is a full fortnight in which nobody outside the company knows where the vehicle is parked, who has access to the keys, or how many miles it covers before you land back home.

That gap between promise and reality has produced some of the most serious consumer prosecutions in UK parking history. Sonny Kaushal, director of Airtime Parking Ltd, was jailed for 32 months at Isleworth Crown Court after defrauding Heathrow travellers of more than £1.3 million. He advertised a secure compound with fencing, CCTV and patrols “minutes from Heathrow” that did not exist. Investigators from Hillingdon Council found customer cars left in fields, on residential streets and on industrial land with no security at all. Some vehicles were damaged, ticketed while left in the open, or had their keys lost, and victims were charged extra fees to get their own cars back. Kaushal was ordered to repay what remained of the money and disqualified from acting as a company director for ten years. Investigators estimated the true number of victims ran into the thousands, most of whom never realised what had happened to their car while they were on holiday, as the vehicle was usually returned in one piece regardless of whether it had spent the fortnight parked on wasteland rather than in the secure compound they paid for.

The Badge That Was Supposed to Protect You

For years, drivers were told to look for the Park Mark logo, run by the British Parking Association, as proof a meet and greet operator met basic security standards. That scheme is now being replaced. From April 2026, Park Mark is being rebranded as Safer Parking and brought in-house under Police Crime Prevention Initiatives, the police-owned body that already vets other security products. The meet and greet award has been renamed Safer Parking Meet and Greet, and it now requires operators to run designated, clearly signposted drop-off and pick-up zones, use fully qualified, insured and uniformed staff carrying visible identification, and store every vehicle in a verified accredited facility rather than wherever happens to be free that day.

The rebrand exists as the old system was too easy to fake. A company with no accreditation at all could simply claim to be “approved” or display a similar-looking badge on its own website, and a driver booking in a hurry from a phone screen had no quick way to check whether that claim was true. Under the new Police CPI-run scheme, the accreditation sits on a searchable national database rather than relying on a logo an operator can simply paste onto their own homepage.

Who Is Actually Watching These Companies

Airports themselves largely do not operate or vet off-site meet and greet firms unless the company holds an official concession, which is why Kaushal could falsely claim to be “the leading Heathrow parking solution provider” while having no allocated space at the airport and no relationship with it whatsoever. Enforcement instead falls to local trading standards teams and councils near the airport, who only act once complaints build up, by which point hundreds or thousands of drivers might already have used the service. The pattern repeats at airports across the country wherever cheap off-site parking is advertised online: Gatwick, Luton, Manchester and Birmingham have all seen similar prosecutions and complaint clusters in recent years, almost always involving companies with no formal relationship to the airport they claim to serve.

A North Somerset Council director said reputable operators do exist alongside the rogue ones, and the difference comes down entirely to what a driver checks before they book, not after something goes wrong. That single distinction, checking before rather than complaining after, is the difference between a holiday that starts smoothly and one that ends with a £600 repair bill and a company that will not answer the phone.

What Compensation You Can Actually Expect

Even when an operator is legitimate, chasing compensation for damage discovered on your return can drag on for months. Most meet and greet contracts include liability clauses that cap what the firm will pay, and some exclude “pre-existing” damage entirely, placing the burden on you to prove the scratch or dent was not already there before you handed the car over. That is precisely why the photographic evidence step below counts for more with meet and greet parking than with almost any other everyday transaction: without a timestamped “before” photo, a dispute over a scratch or dent comes down to your word against the company’s.

How to Fight Back

Before you book any meet and greet service, search for the operator by name plus “Safer Parking” or “Park Mark” on the Safer Parking UK website and confirm the specific airport location is listed, not just the company’s homepage. A logo displayed on a booking site proves nothing by itself, as anyone can copy an image and paste it into their own website design.

Read recent reviews on an independent platform such as Trustpilot rather than testimonials on the company’s own site, and look specifically for one-star reviews mentioning damage, no-shows or unexplained mileage, which is exactly the pattern investigators found before Airtime Parking was shut down. A cluster of near-identical complaints about damage or missed handovers is a far stronger warning sign than a single bad review.

Compare the price against the airport’s own official parking and meet and greet options before booking with a third party. Official airport parking usually costs more, but it comes with a direct contractual relationship, a fixed location you can verify, and a complaints process that does not disappear the moment something goes wrong.

Pay by credit card wherever the cost allows it, as this gives you Section 75 protection under the Consumer Credit Act, making your card provider jointly liable if the service is not provided as described. Photograph your car from all angles, including the odometer reading and fuel gauge, immediately before you hand over the keys and again the moment you collect it, with a timestamp visible in the shot.

If you believe you have been deceived about where or how your car would be stored, report it to your local Trading Standards service through Citizens Advice, and to Action Fraud if money was taken under false pretences, as criminal investigations like the one that jailed Kaushal only start once enough people come forward. Ask the operator directly, in writing, before you book: which accredited facility will store the vehicle, who insures it while in their care, and what compensation process applies if it is damaged. A legitimate operator will answer immediately and in writing. One that stalls, deflects, or offers only a phone conversation is telling you everything you need to know before you have handed over a single key.

Sources:

• Airport parking warning amid multiple complaints, BBC Bristol
• Prolific Heathrow parking fraudster jailed after Hillingdon Council investigation
• Fake Heathrow parking firm in £1.3m scam left cars in fields and streets, Harrow Online
• Safer Parking rebrand, Professional Security Magazine
• Safer Parking Meet and Greet Award, Safer Parking UK