Why SunPass payments may be on their way out at Miami International Airport garages

Miami International Airport plans to stop accepting SunPass payments by the end of the year, cutting off the only remote pay option in the parking garages at one of Florida’s busiest airports.

A recent memo lays out MIA’s strategy to drop SunPass at MIA’s Dolphin and Flamingo garages. Citing outages with Florida’s SunPass system, MIA wants to shift to 16 payment kiosks accepting credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Wallet and other digital pay services.

The latest agreement with a parking operator that won a 2019 bidding contest to upgrade MIA’s garage technology “deletes the SunPass component and installs a ‘Pay-on-Foot’ system, which is a user-friendly alternative,” Jimmy Morales, Miami-Dade County’s chief operating officer, wrote in a memo presented at the Sept. 13 meeting of the county commission’s Airport and Economic Development committee.

Under the new system, garage users could either pay their tickets at the kiosks or use credit cards at machines at cashier-free gates, according to MIA spokesperson Greg Chin. MIA also plans to end cashiers at its garages in an effort to speed exits through an airport that sees more than 40 million people board or leave planes in a typical year. Cashiers currently stationed at the gates would be converted to roving customer-service workers to assist motorists at kiosks and the gates.

SunPass has a following at MIA, since it allows drivers to pay for parking while passing through a special lane without stopping. About 15% of MIA’s parking fees come from SunPass transponders, Chin said.

The airport released a statement calling SunPass too unreliable to be part of the tech upgrade that vendor Designa is scheduled to finish this year.

History of SunPass problems

“Since the State of Florida’s SunPass vendor began processing tolls in 2018, the system has been unable to efficiently process the millions of daily toll transactions statewide and has had frequent system-wide outages, leading to significant garage exit delays at MIA and inconveniencing thousands of travelers,” the MIA statement read. “The vendor has also experienced frequent billing issues, leading to overbilling of users.”

The statement refers to a chaotic stretch for SunPass in 2018 and 2019 when billing woes caused havoc with Sunpass toll accounts and at airports across Florida relying on the transponders as a drive-through payment option. MIA said the problems continue, and on Thursday the airport released a log it says shows 10 Sunpass outages between May and August. Some lasted less than an hour, while one started at 8:45 p.m. on July 1 and ended at 7:10 a.m. the next day.

A representative for Florida’s Turnpike System, which oversees SunPass, was not available for comment.

Miami-Dade’s plan would make MIA the only one of Florida’s four busiest airports to part ways with SunPass, a pre-paid transponder that’s mainly used to collect toll payments throughout Florida’s Turnpike and expressway systems.

The payment system was thrown into turmoil in 2018 when Florida hired a new operator for SunPass, followed by nearly two years of over-billing, delayed charges and outages that cost the state about $50 million in lost toll revenue.

Airports suffered during the statewide meltdown, too. In 2019, MIA reported multiple SunPass breakdowns a month, sometimes forcing the airport to let drivers exit without collecting payment.

At Tampa International Airport that year, an April SunPass outage left parking customers trapped until they came up with other payment options. The mess led to extensive back-ups at Tampa lots, and followed months of other outages, double billings and other issues.

Tampa airport executives threatened to stop accepting SunPass altogether, according to internal emails published by Herald/Times Tallahassee bureau. But the airport opted to stick with SunPass and the toll system reported an end to widespread billing problems by the end of 2019. Tampa continues to accept SunPass payments, as do the airports serving Orlando and Fort Lauderdale.

Changes could be completed by December

The planned SunPass change at MIA is part of a broader refresh of parking technology at the airport, which recently took the top ranking in J.D. Power’s customer-satisfaction survey of the largest airports in the United States.

Designa won the $10 million contract in 2019, but work was delayed by disputes over county obligations and COVID-19, Morales said in the memo. Work started in April, resulting in new digital guides to open parking spaces that went live in September. The payment-system change is set to be completed by December.

The original request for bids required SunPass to be part of the upgraded payment system, but county administrators dropped that feature in June in talks with Designa.

MIA plans to proceed with the negotiated changes unless county commissioners issue other instructions, Morales wrote. Update: On Oct. 5, Miami-Dade commissioners accepted the airport’s plan for a new parking system without a Sunpass payment option. Ralph Cutié, the county’s Aviation director, said the parking kiosks will accept cash payments.

For Brian Bishop, a marketing executive in Miami, SunPass is his go-to payment option at MIA, even with the occasional hiccup, since it lets him skip getting a ticket going in and drive by payment lanes on the way out.

“It’s great. You don’t have to worry about anyone not understanding how to get a ticket,” he said. “When you’re done with your trip, you just drive out. Most of the time, it’s pretty smooth. There have been three or four times when it hasn’t been for some reason.”

Bishop said the times he’s seen SunPass not work, he’s had to wait for a cashier to process the payment and let him out of the payment area. Those problems haven’t stopped him from using SunPass during his nearly weekly trips out of Miami.

“I hope they don’t do away with it,” he said. “That would be very disappointing.”

This story was originally published September 23, 2021 at 2:19 PM.