QR, RFID or face - choosing how guests get through the door

The door sets the tone for your whole event, and a queue spilling onto the pavement undoes a lot of good planning before anyone's had a coffee. So how people get in matters more than it sounds. Three methods come up again and again, and none of them wins outright. The right one depends on who's coming and where.

QR codes are the workhorse. Everyone has a phone, the code lands in their email or wallet, they hold it up, the kiosk reads it, done. It costs next to nothing, and nobody needs to be told how it works. The weak spots are real but easy to plan around: a dead battery, a deleted email, a screen too dim to scan in bright sun. Put a couple of staff on manual lookup and the line keeps moving.

RFID wristbands or cards fit a different shape of event. Festivals, multi-day passes, anywhere people come and go through several points, or where you want entry tied to cashless payments. You tap and you're through, quicker than a scan, and it works when phones don't. What you pay for is the hardware and the handling: physical tags to buy, distribute, and write off when some go missing. For a one-evening dinner, it's overkill. For a weekend festival running three stages, it earns its keep.

Face recognition makes the guest's face the ticket. When it works, it's a genuinely nice moment, people walk straight up and in with their hands full, no fumbling. We've run it well at high-volume corporate days. But be honest about what it asks of your guests. You're handling something very personal, and with government and bank clients especially, plenty of people will not want their face stored, full stop. They're right to ask. So we only ever offer it as a choice, never the only door. We tell people plainly what happens to the image, and we delete it after the event. If you can't promise all of that, use a QR code and sleep easy.

A simple way to decide

Short corporate or government event, a few hundred people, watching the budget: QR, with manual lookup as backup. Multi-day or festival with re-entry and payments: RFID. Very high volume where speed at the door is the whole battle and your guests are fine with it: face, offered alongside QR for anyone who'd rather not.

Whatever you land on, the thing that saves the day is a fallback for when the first method fails one guest. It will, once or twice. A calm staff member with a guest list fixes it in ten seconds. Our kiosks run all three and always keep that manual option within reach.