The expansion comes as Hartsfield-Jackson prepares for a busy spring break travel period, with 7.6 million passengers expected to pass through the world’s busiest airport from March 14 to April 7. Friday March 29 will be one of the airport’s busiest days, with more than 335,000 travelers expected, including connecting passengers.
Some travelers trying to find parking during peak periods have been unable to find a space and have missed flights.
“We’ve owned this land for a while and we had planned on developing it all along, but certainly the airport (parking) shortage was part of the impetus to do it,” said Helen Mouat, Peachy’s general manager. Peachy has the most off-airport parking spaces at the Atlanta airport, she said.
The approval process to build the expansion has taken years, Mouat said.
“We started actually about four or five years ago with going thru the Corps of Engineers to get the permits and going through the city (of East Point) to get the permits, and it’s actually taken longer than we thought it would,” Mouat said.
Hartsfield-Jackson has added some airport-run parking locations in recent years, including the ATL West deck and the ATL Select lot opened in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. But the airport has also closed some park-ride lots to make way for airport construction.
And last year, the airport closed its massive South economy parking lot, removing about 3,000 parking spaces from use next to the domestic terminal. The closure was done to make space for construction of a new parking deck that will take three years to build.
The South economy parking closure followed construction work that temporarily closed large swaths of the North and South parking decks. It’s part of a series of parking construction projects that will cause disruptions through 2034.
Some off-airport parking lots have expanded in years past, including the 2016 opening of the FastPark & Relax lot…
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