From cellular modems to 1.75 million texts a year: FreedomPark scales airport valet messaging on Telnyx

FreedomPark's airport valet runs on reservations. Customers book valet when they book their travel, FreedomPark tracks their flights, and on departure day a valet assigned to the reservation is waiting when they pull up to the airport. The same happens on the way home, and text messages keep every step on time: a gate change, a flight delay, a car brought around at the right minute.

FreedomPark runs that experience through HERO, its own dispatch and CRM platform, and Telnyx carries every message HERO sends and receives. "Our custom dispatch and CRM platform, HERO, uses Telnyx for all inbound and outbound SMS communication with our customers and employees," said Steve McNeese, Executive Vice President/CTO of FreedomPark.

This video interview accompanies FreedomPark's written customer story.

One number instead of a rack of modems

Texting touches nearly every stage of a FreedomPark trip. Customers get flight status, gate information and vehicle service notifications. They make or change reservations by text, and they send photos of documents such as proof of insurance when a vehicle inspection calls for it. Employees get schedule changes, availability requests and time and attendance updates the same way.

Before Telnyx, all of that ran on cellular modems. "As our message volume grew, we had to add more modems, which meant more phone numbers just to keep up with that volume," McNeese said. "That was very confusing to our customers and difficult for us to manage."

Moving to Telnyx collapsed those numbers into one. "Telnyx gave us a platform that was faster, more reliable, and capable of scaling with our growth, while allowing us to communicate through a single toll-free number," he said.

Three airports and more than three times the volume

FreedomPark began at DFW International Airport and has since added Philadelphia International Airport and Phoenix Sky Harbor, with more locations in the works. Messaging grew faster than the footprint.

"When we rolled out our HERO platform in 2018, we sent approximately 480,000 text messages that year," McNeese said. "By 2025, that had grown to 1.75 million messages, more than three times that volume."

The infrastructure question went away with it. "Telnyx has allowed us to scale that communication without having to worry about whether the underlying infrastructure could keep up with our growth," he said.

A severe weather day, handled by text

Peak travel days show what that capacity means in practice. A couple of weeks before the interview, severe weather hit on a peak travel day. FreedomPark handled about 639 inbound texts and almost 7,500 outbound texts that day.

"Before Telnyx, that volume would have overwhelmed our cellular modem solution," McNeese said, "forcing us to fall back on labor-intensive voice calls and virtually eliminating the benefit of the real-time communication."

From fire and forget to delivery status on every message

Speed was only part of the old problem. The modems gave FreedomPark no view into whether a message had arrived. "We just sent it, and it was kind of fire and forget," McNeese said.

With Telnyx messaging, every text comes back with an answer. "Messages are delivered quickly at scale, and we have delivery status and feedback for every single message," he said. When a message fails, the team knows right away and can switch to another process so a critical customer update is not missed.

Why FreedomPark recommends Telnyx

For McNeese, the recommendation starts with reliability, because texting stopped being optional a long time ago.

"SMS started as a nice-to-have feature for our customers, but it quickly evolved into an integral part of how we deliver our service," he said. "Today, if an important text message doesn't reach a customer, we haven't successfully delivered that part of the experience."

That standard shaped what FreedomPark needed from a provider. "We needed a partner we could depend on for minimal downtime and, just as importantly, visibility into the delivery status of every message," McNeese said. "Telnyx gives us that confidence from a technology standpoint. The API is also straightforward to use and easy to integrate, making it a good fit regardless of the technology stack you're working with."