In an effort to win over more customers, car park stairwells are to be made more fragrant and inviting – by having pleasant smells piped into them.

The car park company NCP is to make use of new technology to purge its stairwells of offensive smells, especially urine and vomit, which are putting off many customers.

In the survey carried out by NCP, two-thirds of those polled said that stairwells were the foulest-smelling part of car parks, with one third associating these areas with the smell of urine. 

The company will pump pleasant smells through the stairwells of a number of its busiest sites in London, Birmingham, Leeds and Cardiff. The scent of flowers came top in the ‘smell poll’ they conducted, followed by mint, cut grass and freshly-baked bread.

By wafting pleasant smells through the car park environment, NCP hopes to win back returning customers and entice new ones. Andrew Potter, NCP’s chief executive, said, “by introducing pleasant smells, we are following through on our commitment to improving the customer experience and providing greater value for money”.

However the initiative was criticised by Hugh Bladon of the Association of British Drivers, who said that NCP would be better off increasing car park security to prevent people using stairwells as toilets. “Stairwells particularly smell because people use them as toilets,” he said. “Sorting that out would be the best way to solve the problem. The smell wouldn’t put me off using a car park, the price it charges to park there would.”

But NCP’s survey tells a different story, showing that many car park users are in fact deterred from coming back to car park purely on the basis of the bad smells they encounter … so masking offensive smells with very pleasant aromas may well have the desired result of coaxing customers back.

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