Transport / Sumburgh Airport car parking charge to return next month
THE CAR parking charge at Sumburgh Airport is set to return next month, with new equipment being installed shortly.
The £3-a-day fee has been waived since last year after a fault with the barriers.
But HIAL has now confirmed that the charge will return from 20 August.
The £3-a-day charge was introduced at Sumburgh in 2018, as well as at airports in Kirkwall and Stornoway.
It was controversial at the time, with calls made for a retrospective islands impact assessment on the charge, which was introduced by Scottish Government-owned HIAL to generate more income.
Despite a public bus service serving the airport, many felt the location of Sumburgh – 25 miles from Lerwick at the southern tip of Shetland – meant the fee was unfair.
HIAL said the car parking equipment installed in 2018 had an expected lifespan of five years.
It had hoped it would exceed that lifespan but the “deterioration of the equipment was compounded by the severe weather conditions”.
HIAL said a suitable replacement barrier system has now been identified, and work will be carried out to install it between Thursday (24 July) and Friday 1 August.
The work will include the replacement of car park barriers, the installation of new cameras with automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) technology and the introduction of a cashless payment system.
There will then be a grace period where no parking charges will be made until Wednesday 20 August when the previous parking charges will be reinstated.
Anyone parking prior to the 20 August with stays lasting until after that date, will only be charged from 00:01 on Wednesday 20 August.
Parking will be free for the first two hours and then £3 per 24 hours thereafter.
Exemptions for inter-island and NHS passengers, as well as blue badge holders will continue to apply.
HIAL said the replacement car park barrier system has been specified for “enhanced durability in challenging environmental conditions”, with a projected operational lifespan of five years.
“A scheduled preventative maintenance regime will support optimal performance and extend asset life beyond the baseline specification,” a spokesperson added.
The installation will retain most of the existing infrastructure, such as cabling, ICT equipment and switches, while introducing enhancements.
HIAL said the financial return from car parking is an income stream that will continue to help the company to meet the financial challenges it will face for the foreseeable future.
One of HIAL’s strategic priorities is to increase commercial revenue and develop new revenue streams across all its airports to lower the subsidy requirement and ultimately reduce the cost to the taxpayer, a spokesperson added.
It is understood that HIAL may have missed out on nearly £27,000 in income between May 2024, when the car park barriers were taken out of service, and late October 2024. That figure is based off revenue for the same period in 2023.
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