Logan to test parking perks -- and Dunkin' drive-through

Travelers will soon be able to pay for parking at Logan International Airport while still inside the terminal, avoiding long lines at garage exits. And on the way out, they might be able to grab some coffee and a doughnut for the road.

The Massachusetts Port Authority, which owns Logan, will start testing a new system next month that will let parkers use kiosks inside the airport terminals to pay for their parking using either a credit card or cash, similar to the machines that many garages in downtown Boston and elsewhere already use. At the same time, Massport is planning a number of other experiments aimed at making parking at Logan a more efficient experience, including a "frequent parker" debit card and a system for reserving a parking space at the airport.

If that's not enough to whet Logan parkers' appetites, Massport is in talks with Dunkin' Donuts to build a drive-through coffee shop inside the Central Parking garage at Logan. No deal has been struck, but officials said space for the doughnut drive-through has already been designated and it could open as early as four months from now.

"We have over 7,000 parking spaces in the central garage, and we have the potential of all those customers looking for a cup of coffee before they leave," said Jack Hemphill, business general manager for Massport's aviation division. "It's a customer-service initiative. It's a reasonably risky transaction business because nobody has every tried to put a drive-through coffee facility in a garage, to our knowledge."

The experiment is a first for both Massport and Dunkin' Donuts, neither of which has any prior experience in garage retail. For Dunkin' Donuts, the garage concept represents a stepping-up of its branding efforts locally, said Tom Coba, the chain's vice president for franchising and new business development.

In addition to building a doughnut drive-through in the garage, the company has proposed increasing its signage at Logan and on Massport vehicles like the Logan Express shuttle buses. It also wants to open limited-service Dunkin' Donuts stores at Logan Express stops, beginning in Braintree. In a similar move, the company is building two stores inside the FleetCenter, which it hopes to open before the start of the Democratic National Convention in July.

"We recognize that there's a big opportunity out there in some nontraditional places," Coba said. "Metro Boston's an area where we have a lot of street presence with our brand. What we haven't done is go to the next big traffic area, which is the airport, and put our brand name there."

Martin L. Stein, executive director of the National Parking Association in Washington, D.C., said he's never heard of a drive-through eatery inside a parking facility, although garage developers have included more retail space in their plans in the last decade.

"It might be the first one that I've heard of in terms of a drive-through scenario," he said. "I'd have no reason to think that it wouldn't be viable. It would be a case of how do the landlord and the tenant get things done from a parking perspective and a retail perspective, which is worked out all the time."

Bob Parker, a spokesman for Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, said it once had a latte stand inside its garage that was forced to close because of changes to building codes.

"There was never a shortage of people standing up there ordering stuff," he said. "I'm not surprised at all by this, and I like Dunkin' Donuts."

Logan will not be the first to install an automatic parking payment system. Other airports are either experimenting with them or have them in place. Their widespread use is a nod to the increasing ubiquity of credit card processing technology, which has made cards acceptable everywhere from parking garages to retail stores to vending machines.

At congested urban airports, where travelers face long lines at the parking gates, they are especially popular.

"We haven't even marketed it yet and people have started taking advantage of it," said Mike McCarron, director of community affairs at San Francisco International Airport.

Six months ago, San Francisco International started letting parkers swipe their credit cards through a machine as they enter and leave its garages. The machines records the entry and exit times, then charge the card the appropriate fee.

Logan's system would use kiosks inside the airport instead of at garage entrances and exits. Massport plans to start installing the first of 19 machines inside Terminal B in May or June.

Travelers using the Terminal B garage, between the US Airways and American Airlines terminals, would enter the garage and take a ticket as they normally do. After leaving the plane but before leaving the terminal, they would stick the ticket into one of the kiosks, which calculate the total fees. Parkers would pay the tab with either cash or a credit card at the machine, then use their ticket as proof of payment to get out.

Hemphill said the system will be deployed in the Terminal E garage this summer, and finally in Central Parking around September. Details of the frequent-parker program haven't been worked out, but Hemphill said it would likely involve a debit card that parkers could fill with cash and then use to get in and out of the garage.

Massport will test the first cards this summer using a focus group of frequent travelers that it identified through airlines and local travel agencies, Hemphill said. In the future, anyone with a frequent-parker card would be able to use the Logan Airport website to reserve a parking spot in one of the airport garages, he said.

Keith Reed can be reached at reed@globe.com.