QR codes for hotels and guest houses

A hotel guest arrives tired, with luggage in one hand and a phone in the other. Every second of typing you remove — a Wi-Fi password, a check-in form, a phone number for reception — is a second of goodwill earned. Five codes cover the whole stay, from the door to the review. The mistake almost every property makes is printing them on laminated cards that can never be changed, then discovering the breakfast times on the wall are a year out of date.

The five codes that cover a whole stay

Each of these sits at a moment where the guest is standing still with a reason to scan: arrival, settling into the room, ordering a drink, leaving. Anything printed outside those moments is decoration.

Room Wi-Fi: the code guests thank you for

This is the single most scanned code in any hotel. Print it on the desk card in the room, not only at reception — the guest who needs it is already upstairs. Keep the password short if you can: a long one makes the code denser and harder to read at small sizes in dim room lighting.

If you run separate guest and staff networks, only print the guest one. And when you rotate the password, remember every printed card has to be replaced — which is exactly why hotels that rotate monthly should link to a Wi-Fi page with a dynamic code instead.

The room directory replaces the printed folder

The leather folder on the desk is expensive, always outdated and nobody reads it. One dynamic code pointing at a mobile page does the same job better: breakfast times, spa hours, late checkout, room service, the reception phone number as a tappable link, and the house rules. When the restaurant changes its closing time, you edit the page — the card in 80 rooms stays exactly as printed.

Keep that page short and mobile-first: one screen of the six things guests ask about, with a phone link at the top. Long PDFs of hotel policy get closed in two seconds.

The review code: ask at checkout, not at check-in

The moment to ask for a review is departure — the stay is finished, the impression is fresh and the phone is already out to pay. A small code on the checkout counter or inside the key card sleeve catches exactly that window. Link it to the direct review form rather than your business profile so the guest lands one tap from typing.

Never link a printed code to a page that filters reviews by rating before sending the guest to Google — review gating breaks Google's policy and can cost you the profile. Ask everyone, in the same way.

One code per room: when it is worth the effort

A single directory code is enough for a small guest house. For a property above roughly thirty rooms, a code per room pays off: the destination page can carry the room number, so a housekeeping request or a room-service order arrives already identified, and the scan report tells you which floors actually use the service.

Produce them in one pass from a spreadsheet — one row per room, the room number as the code name so the report is readable — and keep them in a folder per floor. Export SVG or PDF for the print shop, never PNG.

Print sizes and materials that survive a hotel room

Two rules decide whether these get scanned at all. Print matte, never glossy: a bedside lamp reflecting off a laminated card is the most common reason a hotel code fails. And keep the code off the fold of a table tent or the curve of a key card sleeve — a code bent across an edge cannot be read.

What to check once a month

Dynamic codes count every scan by day and hour, so a month of data tells you what the guest book never will: whether the check-in code saves the front desk any time, whether the bar menu is scanned after 10 p.m., whether anyone reads the directory. Retire what nobody scans, and move the codes that work closer to the guest. Reports count scans — they do not identify guests.