For valet operators
Tesla custody software for valet operators
A valet custody window is forty minutes, not four days. The guest hands over a car worth more than the dinner, watches someone they have never met drive it into a garage, and gets it back with nothing but a smile as the record. GuestLot gives that window a start, an end, and a receipt — and it is the one job type where we turn Tesla’s Valet Mode on.
The window is sized to the reservation plus a buffer. Almost every one of them closes early, at retrieval, which is the point.
Friday, 7:11 PM
Forty-six minutes of custody, and nothing to show for it.
A Model Y pulls up at 7:11 for a 7:15 reservation. An attendant takes it to deck 2, three tenths of a mile away. At 7:52 the party asks for the car. At 7:57 it is back at the stand and the guest drives off. That is the whole event, and it is exactly the event nobody can describe two weeks later when a scratch turns into a phone call.
Shops hold cars long enough that memory obviously fails. A valet stand has the opposite problem: the window is so short and so ordinary that nobody writes anything down at all, and you run two hundred of them on a Friday. The ticket says a car came and went. It does not say whether the car left the garage.
So the artifact is small on purpose. A clean valet receipt is four lines long and proves a negative — the car did not go anywhere, the access ended when the guest took the keys back, and here are the timestamps. Short, uneventful receipts are the product.
Visit log · Model Y · VIN …9C41
Cardinal Hospitality Valet · La Sierra
SNAPSHOT CLOSED — FRI 19:57
Sentry reads “not recorded” because we do not claim Sentry behavior during Valet Mode — the field reports contradict each other and Tesla has never published an answer. Details in the Valet Mode guide.
Defaults for a valet stand
We spent a year telling body shops to leave Valet Mode off. A valet stand is what it was built for.
Every other page on this site argues against Valet Mode, because film and collision crews need the frunk, the glovebox, and every door open all day. Invert the job and the same restrictions become correct: nobody at a stand opens the frunk, and nobody needs to reach 70 mph on the way to deck 2.
- Valet Mode on by default. Frunk and glovebox locked, Home and Work destinations hidden, HomeLink disabled, driver profiles and the key list out of sight.
- A 2-mile odometer threshold. Curb to deck and back is a few tenths; two miles is the generous version of that, not the permissive one.
- One geofence: the lot. Any exit alerts immediately, because there is no legitimate off-lot movement during a valet window.
- Guest Mode stays on, so an attendant cannot add a key or change a PIN on a guest’s car.
- Supercharger sessions alert unless a manager marks one authorized — some hotel programs do top off overnight guests, so we ask instead of assuming.
- No live map. Counts and timestamps, the same as every other job type, and no screen that shows staff where a guest’s car is sitting.
Shipped defaults for a valet ticket. Our own speed cap stays unset because Valet Mode's 70 mph limit is already on.
The handoff
Pre-authorization is the flow. The podium QR is the fallback. The card is the honest floor.
A valet handoff has to survive a line of cars and a guest already late for a reservation. So the authorization happens before the car arrives, and everything after that is a confirmation rather than a request.
- The reservation confirmation carries the link. The guest approves in Tesla’s own screen from the passenger seat or from home.
- Access arms and stays dormant. It activates when the car reaches your lot and auto-revokes at the end of the window.
- Armed access reads nothing at all. Until the car is on your lot there is no data.
- A printed sign at the podium. The guest scans it while a passenger unloads and taps approve before the doors close.
- Works for anyone who booked by phone, walked up, or ignored the text.
- It still takes a guest with a phone and about forty seconds. On a rainy Friday you will not get everyone.
- A walk-in with no pre-auth gets a card-only record. Key handoff, named custodian, times in and out — and nothing from the car.
- No odometer delta, no lot watch, no exit alert. The receipt says “not recorded” rather than showing zeros.
- An NFC key card cannot be remote-wiped and leaves no usage trail of its own. Hand it back at the stand and watch it go back in the guest’s pocket.
The full pre-authorization flow is on how it works, and what a guest reads before approving is the owner page — worth linking from your reservation confirmation.
Alongside your stack
Your ticket system digitizes the ticket. This one records the car.
CVPS, FlashValet, SMS Valet, and SYNC already handle ticketless claim checks, text-to-retrieve, payments, validations, and damage photos. Keep them. They were never built to touch vehicle telemetry or Tesla authorization, and we were never built to run your stand.
- One stand is one location, and one location is the Standard plan at $179 per month. Flat, whether you run forty cars on a Tuesday or four hundred on New Year’s Eve.
- No hardware, no cabinet, no wiring into the PARCS. A location is live the same day.
- It only applies to Teslas. Every other car on your deck stays on the ticket system, which is another reason to run both.
- Restaurant groups and hotel portfolios add stands as separate locations, so a receipt always names the property the guest actually visited.
- We do not take payment, validate parking, or dispatch runners, and there is no plan to. See the full comparison.
Risk at the stand
You are a bailee for forty minutes at a time, two hundred times a night.
Holding someone’s car makes you responsible for it, and the duration does not soften that. What changes at a valet stand is volume: the exposure is thin per visit and enormous in aggregate, and the disputes arrive days later with no contemporaneous record on your side. In the valet crash cases that get written up, the vehicle’s own data settled it — in one, the owner paid for an independent data pull because nobody on either side had kept a custody record. That story is in the Valet Mode guide. A closed window with an odometer delta and an exit count is the cheap version of the same evidence. Read garage keepers liability and customer car damaged at a shop. None of this is legal or insurance advice, and none of it prevents anything — it documents. GuestLot is awareness software, not a security system, and the things it will not claim are listed on the limits page.
Questions
From valet operators
Is Valet Mode the right default at a valet stand?
Yes, and this is the only job type where GuestLot ships it on. Tesla's Valet Mode caps the car at 70 mph, limits drive power, locks the frunk and glovebox, and hides driver profiles, the key list, and saved Home and Work destinations. A film shop needs the frunk open all day, so we ship Valet off there. A valet stand needs none of those things open, which is exactly what the mode was built for.
How fast is the handoff at the curb?
Seconds, when the guest pre-authorized on the way in. The reservation text carries the authorization link, the guest approves it in Tesla's own screen before they arrive, and the access sits armed and dormant until the car reaches your lot. Your attendant confirms the vehicle and drives. The QR sign at the podium is the fallback for anyone who did not pre-authorize.
What happens with a walk-in who never pre-authorized?
You get a card-only record, and the receipt says so plainly. With no owner authorization there is no telemetry: no odometer delta, no lot watch, no exit alerts. GuestLot still logs the key handoff, the named custodian, and the times, and prints 'not recorded' wherever data is missing instead of printing a zero.
Does the guest get anything at retrieval?
A text with a tokenized receipt link, and no account to create. On a normal dinner it reads as a short, dull document: access opened at 7:11, 0.4 miles this visit, zero lot exits, access revoked at 7:57. Nothing happened, quickly proven, is the entire product at a valet stand.
What raises an alert during a valet window?
Any exit from the lot fence, immediately. A body shop has legitimate reasons to move a car off site — road tests, sublet work, a calibration appointment — and a valet stand has none. So the geofence is the lot alone, the odometer threshold is 2 miles, and an off-lot reading texts the manager on duty while the car is still gone.
Does this replace our valet ticketing system?
No. CVPS, FlashValet, SMS Valet, and SYNC digitize the ticket — text-to-retrieve, payments, damage photos, PMS and PARCS integrations — and they do that job well. None of them touch vehicle telemetry, Tesla authorization, or custody evidence. GuestLot runs next to your ticketing system, and most operators should keep both.
Keep reading
Tesla Valet Mode at a stand
Every restriction, the PIN rule, and what nobody can answer about Sentry.
vs SMS valet systems
CVPS, FlashValet, SMS Valet, SYNC — and why you run both.
For Tesla owners
Send this with the reservation confirmation.
Pricing
$179 per location per month. One stand is one location.
Security and limits
No live map, no immobilizer, no claims we cannot back.
Answers
Can a valet drive my Tesla? Short answers, all visible.
Give the forty-minute window a start and an end.
Fourteen days, no card. Run a Friday dinner rush on it and let the guests read their own receipts.