By Catharine Hamm

Los Angeles Times

Riddle me this, travelers: When is a car not a car? When it’s an albatross. I thought my crummy rental was a car and not a South Seas winged creature as I whizzed south toward San Diego for a weekend. But that was before I tried to find parking.

Rental cars are a $30-billion-a-year business in the U.S., according to statistics from Auto Rental News. Despite ride-sharing services and public transportation, rental revenues grew by more than $1 billion from the previous year.

Sometimes it makes sense to have a car to cover a lot of ground quickly or to lug a lot of equipment. But then a car becomes a ball and chain.

There are systems to help you find a parking space, and we’re just starting to see them in airports and other destinations frequented by travelers.

Around the airport

Ontario International Airport in the Inland Empire (booking.flyontario.com) and San Diego International Airport (san.org/Parking) now offer on-site parking you can reserve and pay for in advance. (Such innovations at Los Angeles International Airport lots are still in the offing.)

Travelers abroad have been able to reserve/pay ahead of time for years.

“It is true that the U.S. … is a fair way behind,” said Theresa Hughes, chief executive of Chauntry, which describes itself as the “world’s most successful parking reservations system.”

Reserved parking has a revenue benefit, although not always for the customer: As with airline tickets, demand influences prices.

Around the city

If parking is such a problem, why not just add spaces? For one thing, they are expensive to build. For another, they require maintenance. What’s really required, said Steffen Turoff, who manages the L.A. office of Walker Consultants, a parking consulting company, is better management of those spaces.

“If you look just about anywhere, everybody is parking up front, and the spaces and bottom level on the edges are always empty,” he said. “You can keep adding, but you don’t solve the problem.”

An app that tells you what’s available where and for how much will let you manage your time and the parking company manage its space.

A company called Parking Sense and its technology are the force behind a guidance system that vows to lead you to the promised land of reserved parking. It claims that it can cut the time it takes to find parking by as much as a half-hour. Plus, by not driving around looking for a spot, you’re reducing auto emissions.

ParkUp Pay’s app lets you find parking and know the cost before you commit to a spot. It has 87 parking sites in the L.A. area and will add 140 more in the next 12 months, said Jack Bezzant, the chief executive of the company whose goal is to make “parking as reliable as electricity” and says this method is “absolutely cheaper than valet.”

It’s not the only game, of course. I found ParkWhiz and asked it to find a spot near our old L.A. Times offices downtown. It came back with a spot that cost $5 and was a one-minute walk.

Spot Hero, which said that the 85 hours that L.A. drivers waste looking for parking costs $1,700 a year, found a $5 spot six-tenths of a mile from Dodger Stadium for the March 28 home opener against the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Parking Panda found an $11 place just two-tenths of a mile from the Santa Monica Pier. It would, as many apps will, let me use my phone for my mobile pass. Some also allow you to use Apple Pay.

There are many more, and you may need to try several because not every company is in every city.

Try a strategy

When you decide to travel with a car, keep in mind the parking triangle maxim.

The parking triangle, Turoff said, means that parking can be cheap, it can be convenient or it can be plentiful. “It’s always two of the three,” he said. “It can’t be all three.”

Consider how you’ll be using the car. If you need it to reach the hinterlands of your destination, park farther away from where you are staying. That way, you get the cheap or the plentiful, but you will pay in inconvenience.

For getting around town, Turoff said, consider public transportation, bike share or the scooters that everyone hates but are inexpensive and convenient.

If it’s convenience you want, be prepared to pay. It’s why I recently forked over $38 for one night of parking at a hotel on the edge of San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter.

At my second hotel that weekend, my parking ended up being cheap and convenient — a win. I wish I could say I had strategized this move, but I had not asked about hotel parking.

I arrived after dark, parked in the loading zone, schlepped my stuff inside, checked in and asked as sort of an afterthought about hotel parking.

“Street parking,” the hotel clerk said.

I hadn’t yet been educated about apps so I held my breath, walked out into the night and circled twice, three times and then pay dirt. A space on the street.

Street parking is a sought-after commodity, Turoff said, but it’s also finite. It’s high demand and it has high turnover often because of time limits, which makes it a poor substitute for a hotel lot.

I had hit on two of the three parking points Turoff mentioned. The cost for 11 hours of parking: nothing. The convenience: two blocks to the hotel. When I returned the next morning, the car was in one piece. I was lucky.

You have four important tasks if you have a car on vacation:

• Figure out whether you really need the car. Do you really need a security blanket on four wheels? If yes:

• Find out ahead of time where to park. Call the hotel or attraction and ask for help (“Know any secret spots nearby?”) — or use an app.

• Decide how much you’re willing to spend and figure it into the travel budget. Parking is one of the hidden costs of travel and it can be a budget buster.

• What can you live with? Weigh the convenience of your parking spot versus the possible theft or damage to a car in an unprotected lot.

Being a smart traveler isn’t just about plotting places to eat and things to see. Sometimes it’s knowing that how you roll can make or break a trip.