Adapted directly from our June 30, 2026 webinar with the West Virginia Hospitality and Travel Association.
I’m the technical director at Digital Relativity, an advertising agency located in Charleston. We’ve worked in and around the tourism space in West Virginia for a number of years. I grew up as a rafting company kid. I read many a book on the deck outside of Songer when I was in middle school. So I’ve definitely been in it and around it my entire life. I’m not really one for long introductions though, so we’ll just jump right in.
Picture a Family at Your Closed Visitor Center
We’re going to start with a story. Well, a hypothetical. I want you to imagine a young couple. Maybe they have a kid or two, and they walk up to your visitor center after hours. The visitor center is closed. We can assume it’s nighttime since the visitor center is closed. They walk up to the front door after a long drive, just hoping to get some information about what they can do that evening while in the area. Let’s say it’s the first night of their vacation, their first night in town. And they’re just looking for some information.
It’s kind of unreasonable to expect a West Virginia visitor center to be open 24 hours a day. We’re not prone to leaving boxes of goods out front outside the door when we’re closed so people can pick them up. So without another good option, statistically, that family probably pulls out their phone and asks ChatGPT what they should do tonight. And ChatGPT enthusiastically suggests a local pizza place. It’s an old favorite. It’s got years of reviews. And it says it’s pretty close to the visitor center. The only problem is that pizza place closed last year. And ChatGPT did not mention that part.
In this hypothetical, this is the first night of these folks’ vacation, their first impression of the area, really their first time putting, quote unquote, boots on the ground. And we just set them up for a pretty rough start.
Now Put a QR Code on That Closed Sign
So let’s imagine that same scenario. But this time we have a QR code on that closed sign. Again, it’s totally unreasonable to expect the visitor center to be open 24 hours a day. But let’s say we’ve got a QR code on that closed sign, and it sends people to a page that’s designed specifically for people standing in that exact spot.
How did we do that? Well, we know where we put that QR code. We made it. We printed it. We know where we put it. So we know when someone scanned it, where they’re standing. We know where that QR code is physically, so we know where that person was physically when they scanned it. We know the date. We know the time of day. If you, like me, are experiencing today’s West Virginia weather, we also have a pretty good idea of what the temperature is wherever they’re standing.
So we can suggest another local restaurant that’s actually open. Because our website has a calendar on it, we know that restaurant, very close to the visitor center, has free live music tonight. And we know parking is free. They’ve already parked where they should to get free parking to go to that restaurant. We really didn’t change anything other than putting that QR code on the closed sign, and we totally took hold of that experience and saved them from what would have been a really frustrating night, using information that we already have.
Broken Analytics Are a Silent Killer
One of the things I always tell people about analytics, and specifically broken analytics on a website, is that they’re kind of a silent killer. Because no amount of money can go back in time and put Google Analytics on your website 10 years ago. You just can’t buy that.
And what I’m describing here, this idea of meeting visitors where they are physically in the real world, probably sounds similar. If you describe it without attributing it to QR codes, it kind of sounds fanciful. I always think of this like a hokey movie. There was a remake of the movie The Time Machine that came out when I was a kid. A big part of that movie is him talking to a holographic AI in an abandoned library. And if you don’t say “and we’re going to do it with QR codes,” this idea that you’re going to present someone with information based on where they’re standing, and they won’t have to install an app, it kind of sounds like that. It sounds crazy. Until you reframe it. That, oh, a QR code can do this.
And this idea, meeting people where they are in the real world physically, is kind of rare in digital marketing when you really think about it. The most highly targeted social ads can’t do this. I mean, we could always say show this ad to people in Fayetteville. You can’t target people standing in front of your visitor center after it’s closed. The most expensive email campaign certainly can’t. And even AI, the thing that’s on the top of every agenda in every conference room in the country right now, can’t do something specifically when someone is standing in front of your visitor center when it’s closed.
Things You Can Actually Measure Are Getting More Valuable
At a time when folks in the travel and tourism space are being asked to quantify and measure the impact of your work, maybe more than any point in the past, both to your boards and to your members, things that you can actually measure are getting more and more valuable. I can remember years ago, especially early on in the pandemic, all these conversations about how data is the new gold. Data that you own, data you can reliably depend on to quantify the efforts of your work, that’s incredibly valuable, and it’s only become more so.
The Hunger for Real World Interactions
At the same time, coming out of the pandemic, there’s an enormous demand from users and from visitors for real world interactions. When things first started reopening a few years ago, I remember seeing this reflected across the board when we looked at the analytics for all the folks we worked with. What we were calling revenge travel at the time. This idea that, oh, I couldn’t go on vacation for that year, that 18 month period. And we saw that bounce back with a vengeance. People were going on vacations trying to make up for lost time. That demand, that sense of scarcity around real world interactions, has only grown in the meantime, with social media, artificial intelligence, all of it. There’s a desire among people for things that are physical, things in the real world. And I think as we go through this, you’ll see that QR codes might just be the answer to that.
I Gave My First QR Code Talk in 2011
I gave my first conference talk ever in 2011. And it just happened to be about QR codes. I regrettably don’t have a picture of me with my ridiculous sideburns giving that talk. I did manage to take a picture of my name on the sign, probably to send my grandma. But I show you this to set the stage for just how long we’ve been talking about this technology.
Fifteen years ago, in 2011, QR codes were cool. They were still kind of weird, and they were a little bit of a novelty. They required special apps. No phones had QR code scanners built into them. This is insane to believe, but the iPhone was less than 5 years old when I gave that talk. So mobile web was also still kind of a novelty. The idea that you had a desktop website and a mobile website, and those were separate websites, was still very much the norm. But there was this sense that, wouldn’t it be cool if you could put a link in the real world? Wouldn’t it be cool if you could direct people to digital resources, to digital information, in the real world? That would be really cool if it actually worked.
What Changed, and the Trail Map That Lives on My Phone
So much has changed in the meantime. For most people, their phone is the computer they use the most. And every modern phone has a QR code scanner built into the camera. Just this month, Apple announced that in the new version of iOS coming out this fall, you’ll be able to save arbitrary QR codes to the Wallet app on your iPhone. And I realize how that sounds. That sounds a little hokey. Why would I save a QR code to use later?
I have a really good example of this, where if I could have done it years ago, it would have saved me personally a lot of fretting. Since 2011, when I moved back to West Virginia, unrelated to that conference talk, it just happened to be the same year, I started mountain biking. On the Arrowhead Trails here in Fayetteville, I grabbed the PDF of that trail map from the National Park Service and saved it to my phone. So that even without cell service, if I had no internet whatsoever, that PDF was on my phone. If I were on the trail and got lost, I’d always have that map.
I’ve probably ridden a few hundred miles of that trail system. It’s less than 50 miles, but I’ve ridden every inch of it since then. And every phone I’ve had since 2011, I’ve kept that map on it. Just in case. You never know. Maybe you’re out there, something happens to you, someone finds your phone, maybe they get lost, whatever the case may be. I keep that map on my phone.
This year specifically, I don’t know what it is, I’ve run into like three people from out of state on those trails who got lost, and I’ve been like, oh, I have the PDF of the map. And what happens is I have to text that stranger the PDF, which means I have to give that stranger my phone number. If I had a QR code saved to my phone, that would just give them the map. They could just get it, and I wouldn’t have to give them my number.
So it’s a long way of saying there’s a lot that can be done with QR codes that isn’t obvious at first glance. If you put me in a corner and asked, could you use QR codes to get the Arrowhead trail map to people from your phone, my first thought would have been no. But when you really think about it, there’s no reason you couldn’t. And again, it’s totally anonymous. You wouldn’t have to give them your phone number. You wouldn’t have to tell them your name.
QR Codes Quietly Became Infrastructure
That doesn’t even get into payments. Square, Cash App, things like that. These have become the de facto payment platform at every farmer’s market in the country. I’m not sure anyone has done more to normalize the use of QR codes than these payment platforms. And this is so second nature, so obvious, that this example didn’t even occur to me. I went through the slide deck with my brother-in-law, who’s 19, over the weekend, and he was like, oh, you need to mention Square and Cash App, because I think we all just take for granted that those are even QR codes. But if you’ve ever paid for baked goods or cheese or whatever the case may be at a farmer’s market, odds are good you had to scan a QR code to pay those folks. It’s just become infrastructure. It’s just a part of everyday life.
The Playbook Still Holds Up
Some of the old examples are a little silly, but I wanted to include them for context. These are slides from that 2011 presentation, things I was suggesting at the time you do with QR codes. My favorite is the one in the bottom right. It was still such a novelty that you’d see a different keyboard depending on what you were typing on the iPhone, that I dedicated an entire slide to it.
But as silly as they may be, the one thing I told that room in 2011 is still basically true. This has a dead simple playbook. You should build something worth scanning. You should send people somewhere worth going. And you should measure what happens when they do it, and how often they do it. Fifteen years later, I don’t know that I have better advice than that. All of it is still true. But what nobody predicted, what I definitely didn’t predict, is that QR codes in 2026 might just be the best means of reaching people in the real world when they’re in a destination.
How QR Codes Go Wrong
When I started putting this talk together, I asked around. What do you think of when you think of QR codes? What are the bad things? And the very first one that came up time and time again was restaurant menus. Menus that don’t have a price. Maybe they don’t have a printed menu at all, and you have to scan a QR code. I want to address this first and foremost. We’re going to consider this the low point. This is the floor. Hopefully everything else we describe is going to be better than a QR code for a restaurant menu. This is a bad use case, and I’m with you. This is not how I prefer to interact with a menu either.
But let’s look at some other not-shining examples. Very basic first: a QR code that just sends people to generic information. Say you have a printed trail map for your destination with a QR code on it. People swing by the visitor center, get a copy of the map, and head out on the trail. Or maybe they haven’t come to the destination at all yet, and the trail map is something you mail to people. You put a QR code on it. And it just sends people to your homepage. The scan worked. The person scanned it. But that experience is kind of a failure. If the person is standing at the trailhead and needs additional information, maybe they’re looking for trail closures, and you just send them to the homepage, that’s not great. That wasn’t worth scanning.
Next one: a fixed URL that was printed, where you can’t change the destination later. Use that trail map example again. Say you print, I’m just going to make up a number, 100,000 of those maps. And for whatever reason the site gets redesigned, you get a new domain name, something happens that breaks that URL. The issue is you can’t change it with a QR code like this. The site gets redesigned, the URL changes, and now there are 100,000 QR codes out in the world that are just wrong. You can’t change where they go. You might not even know when it broke. This could be a guide you printed years ago that’s still sitting in a dentist office somewhere. All of those become a liability, because you can’t change where that QR code goes after the fact.
Now this one. Anybody who knows me, who has worked with me, you know this one makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. A QR code out there with no tracking on it whatsoever. I get goosebumps just thinking about it. You ran the campaign, you printed the QR codes, and I bet it was awesome. I bet it absolutely crushed it. I bet that QR code moved the needle in a way no one could have dreamed. And you’ll never know that. No scan numbers, no stats on how those users behaved once they reached the website. So when the budget conversation comes up next year, there’s no way of knowing if the QR code was even worth it. Not being able to track these things, again, the missing analytics, no amount of money can buy a time machine. That’s just data that’s lost.
This next one isn’t specific to QR codes, but I like throwing it in. That billboard, you’ll notice, has a domain on it. That domain doesn’t go anywhere related to the billboard. I tried. So presumably someone bought the billboard, bought the domain, then just let the domain expire. You see this happen with campaigns all the time. You make a custom URL for a landing page. Maybe you buy a domain for a special campaign. And I see this out in the world a lot. People buy a domain and insist that everything about the campaign has to go through the special domain they bought. So you point all those QR codes at it. Looks great on signage, looks cool in the address bar. Works fine for a month. Then the event ends. The link breaks. And for the next 6 months, every time someone scans that QR code, they get a page not found. Just like those printed guides, that’s silent brand damage in public. Every one of those is an instance where we could have reached that person, just like the visitor center example. But we weren’t really minding the QR code. So it just sat out there festering.
A QR Code Is a Link in the Real World
Here’s what all of these have in common. A QR code, I said this at the beginning, is literally a link in the real world. So close your eyes. Imagine you’re looking at Wikipedia. Picture a link in the body of a Wikipedia article. Blue. Underlined. We all know what a link usually looks like. A QR code is literally that, out in the wild. Nobody on your team would knowingly put a broken link on your homepage. You’d catch that. You’d have a conversation about it. It would be something that had to be addressed. But that’s the physical equivalent of what’s happening on signage, brochures and banners across the country right now with these neglected and poorly configured QR codes.
In 2011, a bad QR code was a wasted print run. We wasted a lot of paper if we did it wrong, and that’s not good. But in 2026, we’re wasting a piece of what might be the one surface where you can guarantee you’re reaching an actual person out in the real world. And that surface is getting more valuable every day, because of what’s happening everywhere else.
AI Is Rewriting How People Find You
Visitors are starting their trip planning with conversations, not with searches. They’re getting recommendations from platforms like ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini that have never been to your destinations, that in the case of DMOs have never met your members. And unlike a DMO that has an event calendar, they can’t tell you what’s actually open tonight, and they can’t tell you what’s going on in town tonight. These platforms are friendly and confident. Oftentimes very helpful. And oftentimes just wrong.
When a traveler discovers your destination through one of these AI assistants, that assistant owns the relationship. You become a source. Your website becomes a source. You’re a parenthetical in that conversation, a footnote basically. And DMOs in particular are especially exposed to this, because what you’re selling is inspiration. It’s information. It’s not a transaction necessarily. There’s no cart, in most cases no reservation, no actual purchase taking place that necessitates the relationship come back to you in some way. Once the platform gets that information from you at some point in the past, it doesn’t really need you anymore.
The IKEA Lesson
But there’s something here that poking fun at Google doesn’t quite get to the heart of. This is the exact same dynamic furniture makers went through when IKEA started bringing mass produced furniture at deep prices to consumers. The mass production of furniture didn’t kill handmade furniture. It was honestly quite the opposite. It made handmade furniture far, far, far more valuable, because it showed just how special something could be when it was made by an expert.
AI is doing the exact same thing here. You can find generic trip recommendations everywhere. I could ask my glasses to make an itinerary for me. I’d imagine a lot of people on this call could probably ask their refrigerator to find a cabin near them. But verified, in-market, real time engagement, you can’t fake that. And that’s where QR codes really shine. That’s a real person in a real place at a fixed point in time. And no platform can intermediate that. Social media can’t. Email can’t. The manufacturer of the phone even can’t, because the QR code scanner is just built into the camera. No AI tool can replicate that. This idea of meeting people in the real world physically with information like this, with interactions like this, is one of the very few things in marketing that is definitionally almost impossible to fake. And that’s getting really rare.
100,000 Real People
Across all the folks we worked with last year, we saw more than 100,000 QR code scans. That’s crazy. That’s a huge number. As someone from Logan County, I’ve probably never even seen 100,000 people. That’s an alarming amount of people. And in the context of QR codes, it’s important to keep that in mind. Those are literally people. To put it in context, that’s more people than can fit in the Denver Broncos home stadium during a game. Every single one of those is a real person who made the choice to pull out their phone and scan that QR code. It wasn’t swiping. It wasn’t scrolling. They lifted their phone and scanned. No bot can do that. That’s not an impression. That’s a real engagement with someone out in the world.
Verified engagement at scale, out in the real world, is something really special. And QR codes are generating that at scale. Over 100,000 last year. I’m going to keep harping on this. That’s a ton of traffic. 100,000 is just objectively a huge number.
But those aren’t casual interactions either. When we look at traffic to the websites we manage from QR code scans, and again this requires that tracking be set up properly, this fluctuates with campaigns and seasonality a little bit, but on the whole, engagement metrics like time on site for people who arrived from a QR code consistently outperform site averages. In a world where organic search is basically drying up, the fact that we have any channel where we’re reliably outperforming site averages at that scale is really cool. And the fact that it’s a QR code is an indication that that person is such a qualified lead. Knowing that person physically took an action to do that, that’s huge. And that’s, again, just so rare today.
Back to That Closed Sign
So let’s go back to that visitor center at the very beginning. The QR code on the closed sign. We know we are 100% not going to just point it at the homepage. We’re going to point it at a landing page built specifically for this moment. That page knows where the person is standing, because you know where they’re standing, because you know where you put that QR code. It knows the time. It knows the day and the day of the week. It can pull in the weather. So when that family scans it, it’s 8 p.m. on a Tuesday in October, and that page knows what’s happening right now. It knows what’s happening tonight, where they can park, what’s within walking distance of where they’re standing.
That page, being something people get to digitally from the real world, means it can change every hour without you having to make a new sign. The QR code points to the page, but the page can evolve. The page can be dynamic. And every one of those scans should be measured from the moment that QR code is made, because that URL, again, we tagged it properly, we have all the analytics set up. So we know with certainty when it’s being used. You might be shocked to find how many people are trying to come to that visitor center at night once you start looking at the analytics for the QR code on the closed sign, and see it just going gangbusters. Unless you have a security camera, there’s not really another way of knowing that. This gives us an opportunity to build content for that exact moment, for people standing in that exact spot. We could literally say things like look to your left, look to your right, because we know which direction they’re facing, because we know where the QR code is. To my knowledge, there’s nothing else in marketing that can do that.
Ideas Worth Stealing
That closed visitor center is one shape of this, but here are some others I’d love to see everybody on this call steal. If I go into town this weekend and see some of these, it would make my day.
Closed restaurant signs offering some kind of return visit incentive. Somebody walks up, maybe you’re closed on an inconvenient day of the week. Put something on that closed sign, even if it’s just 10% off an appetizer. It doesn’t have to be anything crazy. Just something that says, hey, we missed you. We know you’re obviously hungry, you’re standing outside a restaurant, and we weren’t ready to accommodate you in this moment. Come back, and we’ll have a little make good. Get an extra dessert, or whatever the case may be.
Trail and wayfinding QR codes with some kind of offline fallback and time aware content. What I was specifically thinking of here was trail closures. We’ve had a ton of storms around here, and I was riding with a friend last weekend and came around a corner and, whoa, there was a huge tree in the middle of the trail. That’s exactly the kind of thing. A QR code on the trail signage that links to some crowdsourced trail closures from something like AllTrails or the MTB Project.
Event banners. The nature of an event is that it will end. So hypothetically, you don’t get all the signs down the minute it’s over. Send all those QR codes to some kind of wrap up content, or a teaser for the next time the event is going to happen, be that next month or next year. Just something to give people a little taste. Hey, you obviously scanned this at an inopportune time for us, but we do have something for you in this moment.
Co-op print pieces with partner specific tracking, so you can prove which partners are delivering the scans. And being able to say, man, scans really drop off toward the end of this guide, that’s huge. You may decide you could double the length of this guide, or maybe it doesn’t need to be this long. Maybe people aren’t consistently making it to the end. A ton of cool stuff you can do with those. And again, steal them. I’d love it if they got used.
What Would You Say if You Were Standing Right Next to Them
What we’re really talking about is something marketers, even before digital marketing, have been chasing for years. What would a tourism marketer say to a visitor to make their trip magical if you were standing right next to them? If you knew where they were, what day it was, what the weather was doing, and what was happening two blocks away, and you were just standing next to them, what would you do? You do know the answer to those things. You’ve always known. For most of the folks on this call, it might literally be your job to know. A QR code in the right place, pointed at the right kind of page, gets you there.
Start With One
So my recommendation, what I’m going to say everybody on here should do, is pick one experience, one spot. Set the QR code aside. Set the page aside. Don’t think about those yet. Think about one spot where you wish you could just stand next to people and say, oh hey, if you look to the left, there’s actually something else here. Oh hey, if you look right here, there’s actually something a little different. It might even be a song. If there’s a piece of music that has some historical significance to a specific place, put a QR code on there. Hey you, if you’re interested in the musical history of this place, boom, it’s right here. Check out this song while you’re standing in this spot.
Get that experience in your mind before you build the page, before you print the QR code. Because otherwise you’re doing it in reverse. You have to start with making something worth scanning, getting people information when they need it that’s actually helpful in that moment, because again, you know where they’re standing. You know where you put the QR code. Think about what would be useful in that moment. Then do it. Make the page.
One more thing that came to mind putting this together. Make the page before you make the QR code, then take your phone and literally go stand in that spot. See if the page helps you. You may find, standing there, there’s a lot you have to scroll through when you’re standing. Revisit it before the QR code ever gets printed. So again, think about the experience, build the page, go to where the QR code will be, then print the QR code and put it out there. That would be my one recommendation for everyone on the call. Just one QR code.
Questions From the Webinar
Where do you get QR codes that you can update on the back end?
There are a ton of tools for generating QR codes. My recommendation would be that it should require a login. I say that because so many of these, I think Canva has one, don’t require you to log in, and if it doesn’t require a login before you use it, then there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to get back to it. A year later, if you needed to edit that code without a login, you’re never going to be able to go back and change it. So rather than giving you one specific platform, I’d just say look for one with a login. There are lots of paid services, and I’m cheap, so I get it. The one we use internally is literally the-qr-code-generator.com, and it’s paid. Granted, we were dealing with hundreds of thousands of scans a year. But I do think you’re probably going to be looking at some paid options if you’re doing these at scale.
If you want a kind of backdoor way of doing this without paying for a dedicated QR generator, you could use something like Bitly, a link shortener. Now, I’m pretty sure Bitly requires a paid account to change where a link goes after the fact, so your mileage may vary. But a link shortener paired with one of these free QR code services would also theoretically get you there, because you could change where that link points after the fact. And a shout to Kelly in the chat, who pointed out that Uniqode has a low-cost option for up to 50 practical QR codes.
Is it still best practice to use short URLs in the QR code rather than long URLs with UTMs?
I’m so glad someone asked this. I had a slide about it and took it off because I thought it was getting into the weeds. This probably tells you more about me than I’d prefer, but you can tell when you look at a QR code how long the URL is. I know this sounds insane to describe, but I’m constantly doing this with my wife when we’re out places. I’ll be like, they didn’t shorten that URL. When you look at a QR code, it looks busier. The black portions are smaller and there are more of them. That typically means there’s more information in the code, so the URL is longer. If the black portions are bigger, more clustered, more contiguous, and there are fewer little dots, that typically means the URL is pretty short.
Best practice is still to try to keep that URL short. If you’re using a redirect layer, like we talked about at the beginning, so you can change it after the fact, you should be able to add all the UTMs and tracking you need without making the code’s dots get really small. So yes, keep that URL as short as you can. And if you’re using a tool that redirects it for you, the UTMs really shouldn’t hurt it.
Can Digital Relativity provide advice on this on an hourly basis?
We absolutely can. Just reach out at digitalrelativity.com, drop us a message, and we’d love to work with anyone who wants to talk about QR codes.