West
QR Codes By the Bay
By Leo Jakobson
January 26, 2012
When several thousand meetings professional descended on San Diego last month for the Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA) Convening Leaders conference, J. Peter Lynn, general manager of the Hilton San Diego Bayfront, saw an opportunity to test planners’ interest in using QR codes when they bring groups to his hotel.
With his property one of four official host hotels for the conference, which took place Jan. 8-11, Lynn placed three placards with QR codes that could be scanned by attendees’ smartphones in different public areas of the hotel. The experiment was not advertised to guests or attendees, and the codes themselves had no signs or instructions.
“Each one took you to a different video clip [on YouTube],” Lynn said. “The intent was to find out who has the patience to go through all three codes, to see it and understand what it is.”
The videos are each about one minute long and feature Lynn, his director of convention sales, Kelsi Dart, and Hilton’s Greater San Diego-area Director of Sales and Marketing Donovan Henson. Each talked briefly about the part of the Hilton San Diego Bayfront they were filmed in, and then gave viewers
one of three clues.
“Hilton Worldwide had a sales lounge in part of our bar in the lobby,” Lynn says. “We wanted to get customers to that lounge, so on the last clip we said ‘Take all three clues to the sales lounge, introduce yourself, and then we’ll have a drawing for free 25-person meeting, with food and beverage.’ The real intent of it, obviously, was just to get the customer in front of our salespeople, and for us to understand, do QR codes really interest this audience and is there a place for it?”
In the end, 25 attendees visited the lounge with all the clues. “I would say it was a success,” said Lynn. “I told my team, I’ll expect nobody to find it. So, 25 was a win.”
The property has experimented with the codes before, Lynn said. “We have had a couple of groups—mostly pharmaceutical—that we’ve sold them to as a way to market certain things about their program in the hotel.” But they have not been a formal offering to meeting planners. Now that might change.
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