There is a Dayton motel that was torn down in 2018. You can still find it listed for airport parking online today — with a nightly rate, a star rating, 24-hour operating hours, and a button offering to notify you when a space opens up.
That is not a scam in the usual sense. Nobody set out to sell parking at an empty lot. It is what happens when booking sites copy inventory from each other and nobody drives past to check.
We are across the road from Dayton International. We watch these places open and close. Here is what has actually gone, and what you will still find listed.
Airport Inn & Parking, Vandalia — gone since 2018
The Airport Inn sat about a mile and a half from the terminal on West National Road. It was sold in February 2018 — Montgomery County parcel B02 01011 0006, $850,000, to a realty holding company — and demolished that same year. There has been no transfer since.
There is no building on the site today. What is left is the old parking surface — cracked asphalt with grass coming up through the seams — and rows of new SUVs and pickups parked on it. The car dealership next door uses the lot to store overflow inventory. The entrance is closed off with a chain strung between two posts, anchored by a boulder someone dropped at the edge of the pavement.
That is the whole thing. Pavement, weeds, unsold cars, and a chain.
We are a quarter of a mile away. We watched it come down.
What is still listed, as of August 2026
Search Book2Park for Dayton International and you get this, verbatim:
1 Parking Lots Found.
AIRPORT INN & PARKING – DAYTON AIRPORT – MINIMUM 10 DAYS RESERVATION
★ 4.7 · 3 Reviews
75 Corporate Center Drive, Vandalia, OH 45377
1.8 mi From Dayton International Airport
Minimum Reservation Length: 10 Days
Operation Hours: 24 Hours
4 people are looking today
$4.75 / Day — Total $32.13
This lot is not available at the moment. [Notify Me]
Read that again. It is the only Dayton lot Book2Park lists. Their entire inventory for this airport is a motel that has not existed since 2018.
It carries a 4.7-star rating from three reviews. It reports operating hours — 24 hours, for an empty slab. It carries amenity icons for security cameras and shuttle service. Its listing photo shows the motel building still standing. It tells you four people are looking at it today. And when you try to take it, it offers to notify you when availability opens up.
What $4.75 a day actually costs
We ran the same lot at three different trip lengths on 24 August 2026. Same listing, same $4.75 headline rate:
| Trip length | Total charged | Actual cost per day |
|---|---|---|
| 3 days | $21.68 | $7.23 |
| 5 days | $32.13 | $6.43 |
| 10 days | $58.25 | $5.83 |
The formula behind those numbers is consistent to the cent: your days at $4.75, plus 10%, plus a flat $6.00. On a three-day trip the flat fee alone is worth more than a day and a quarter of parking, which is why the advertised rate and the real rate are furthest apart on exactly the trips most people take.
There is one more thing worth noticing in that table. The listing says Minimum Reservation Length: 10 Days. It priced a three-day stay anyway.
Meanwhile the copy beside the listing reads: “Starting at $3.95 per day including complimentary shuttle to and from DAY. Book2park.com selects its partners carefully to provide you with a top quality parking experience!”
Airport Parking Reservations lists it too. So do Way.com and Global Airport Parking — both under the same inventory ID, 6654622, which is the clearest sign that these listings share one feed rather than four independent checks.
The motel has no website. It is not in the Vandalia-Butler Chamber of Commerce directory. There is no recent review of it anywhere, because there has been nothing to review for the better part of a decade.
Thrifty Airport Parking — closed 2017, now a truck driving school
Thrifty operated at 2700 W National Road, Dayton, Ohio 45414. It closed in 2017. Google Maps has it right: “Thrifty Parking, 2700 W National Rd,” permanently closed.
The lot is not empty, though. It is a semi truck driving school. Drive past and you will see tractor-trailers parked along the frontage and orange cones set out across the asphalt in a course — students practising backing and turning where travellers used to leave their cars. The old monument sign is still standing at the road, its face blank.
What you can still find: ParkingAccess.com lists “Thrifty Airport Parking” at around $5.50 a day. The Yelp page is still up, unflagged, sitting at one star — a rating collected from a business that stopped taking cars nearly ten years ago.
If you booked that $5.50 rate and drove to the address, you would arrive at a driving school mid-lesson.
And one that closed but is not a lot
Dayton International’s own valet service closed in March 2020 and has not reopened. Travellers still ask for it at the terminal. If you want your car parked for you at DAY, we are the only option — that is not a sales line, it is just the current state of the airport.
Why dead lots stay bookable
Booking sites are not parking lots. They resell space at facilities they do not own or operate, and their inventory comes from feeds that get copied between platforms. When four sites show the same listing under the same inventory ID, that is one record being passed around, not four companies confirming a lot is open.
Nobody in that chain has a reason to drive to Vandalia and look.
How to tell before you pay
- Search the facility’s own name. A working parking lot has a website, a phone number, and recent reviews. A demolished one has none of those.
- Check the map, not the listing. Satellite view settles it in ten seconds.
- Read the rules before the rate. That $4.75 listing carries a ten-day minimum. On a four-day trip, that is not a cheap rate — it is a six-day surcharge with a low number on the front of it.
- Add up the total, not the daily rate. A flat booking fee turns a $4.75 headline into $7.23 a day on a short trip.
- Ask who you call if something goes wrong. If the answer is a booking site rather than the lot holding your car, you have your answer.
More on how those listings work: Cheap Dayton Airport Parking: What Those $3.99 Listings Actually Are.
What is actually at Dayton International
Four real options, all of them open:
- The airport’s own lots — economy at $9.00 a day, long-term at $14.00, short-term at $16.00, garage at $23.00, each plus a one-time $0.99 exit fee. You park and you walk.
- Park-N-Go — our lot on West National Road, directly across from the terminal. $9.99 a day economy, $11.39 all in. Our own shuttle, four minutes to the door, no booking fee, free cancellation.
- Full-service valet — $12.99 a day reserved. We meet you at your car.
- Nothing else. That is the honest list. Anything advertising Dayton airport parking at $4 a day is selling you something that is not on this list.
If you want those four lined up side by side with the fees included, we keep a running comparison: Park-N-Go vs. Dayton Airport parking, updated monthly.
We have been at this address for over thirty years. We will still be here when you land.