The quick ready (QR) or matrix barcode has proven itself resilient beyond a mere pandemic fad. First they were a novelty, or often a joke, before gaining widespread adoption during the pandemic due to their contactless utility. Then as we shifted out of the pandemic, their benefits for saving on printing costs and labor efficiency were also too good to ignore. Together, this technology determinism has solidified the QR code’s place in hotels for the next half a decade at least, and yet their full potential hasn’t been unlocked.
With the travel recovery craziness sunsetting back into a period of relative normalcy for demand and labor forecasting (that is to say, we now know that labor will be constantly in short supply), it’s time to look ahead to 2023 and how we can better use this technology that’s been embraced, albeit often reluctantly, by both hospitality brands and our customers.
While the two of us both relish a good fireside chat about all things web3, crypto, longevity tech and super-sustainability projects, these are rather far-off aspirations – and thus unobtainable in the near-term – for most properties largely because of labor shortages in the IT department. When considering both your tech stack and your ‘human stack’, available resources for the calendar year dictate that it’s better to augment what you already have, which in this case is the QR code and the bevy of vendors doing incredible things to help you use it to optimize service and conversions.
The Digital Restaurant Menu Experience
To gain adoption, a QR experience must be more convenient or contextual than current customer habits, or it must dangle a carrot that’s too good for the guest to refuse – for example, offering a promotion to offset a high-friction app download that also captures first-party data. This grand idea of the guest experience is often too ambiguous, so it’s better to drill down to specific operations to derive quantifiable improvements.
We thus start in the restaurant where QR-accessible menus have shown tremendous value for:
This all said, there are objections. Here you encounter the growing lamentations over on-prem QR overload, particularly if these are plastered as signage everywhere, as well as the concern of the loss of genuine interactions between customer and brand representative (be that a server or associate).
But perhaps one of the most often customer-side complaints against QR menus is that patrons can’t see the full menu in one snapshot. This can hurt the branding for high-end restaurants where a thick cardstock or leatherbound menu backing adds to the experience, but more significantly the nuisance of pinching in or scrolling through the menu off a phone can result in items getting missed, amounting to lost revenues and more time spent by servers compensating for this issue.
The solution here is to work towards a better mobile menu experience, with the following as possibilities for you to figure out what can work with your team’s current bandwidth:
Connecting the Guestroom and Onsite Amenities
As we transition to the QR experience version 2.0, it’s only natural that this coincide with the deployment of more IoT devices and the evolution towards a bona fide connected room. This tech can indeed offer a series of contextual and filtered actions to enhance the in-room experience, including but not limited to:
Next, for on-demand amenities, the versatility of QRs allow hotels to maintain service in a labor-light operative model by letting guests order whenever and from wherever they want. Especially for full-service properties, some possibilities include:
Having made it this far, you can tell that some use cases may apply to your organization and some do not. It really comes down to the last bullet point in that hotels can never loss sight of the human element in service-oriented business. Any QR functionality you set up must ultimately never take away from the guest experience, but add convenience and increase amenity awareness so that your teams can focus their limited time on other product evolutions.
Together, Adam and Larry Mogelonsky represent one of the world’s most published writing teams in hospitality, with over a decade’s worth of material online. As the partners of Hotel Mogel Consulting Limited, a Toronto-based consulting practice, Larry focuses on asset management, sales and operations while Adam specializes in hotel technology and marketing. Their experience encompasses properties around the world, both branded and independent, and ranging from luxury and boutique to select-service. Their work includes seven books: “In Vino Veritas: A Guide for Hoteliers and Restaurateurs to Sell More Wine” (2022), “More Hotel Mogel” (2020), “The Hotel Mogel” (2018), “The Llama is Inn” (2017), “Hotel Llama” (2015), “Llamas Rule” (2013) and “Are You an Ostrich or a Llama?” (2012). You can reach Larry at larry@hotelmogel.com or Adam at adam@hotelmogel.com to discuss hotel business challenges or to book speaking engagements.
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