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

The door is where your event makes its first impression, and a queue out onto the pavement undoes a lot of good planning before anyone's had a coffee. So the question of how people get in matters more than it sounds. There are three common ways, and none of them is simply the best. It depends on who's coming and where.

A QR code is 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 almost nothing and people already know what to do without being told. The weak spots are real but manageable: someone whose battery died, someone who deleted the email, the screen too dim to scan in bright daylight. You cover those with a couple of staff who can look a name up by hand, and the line keeps moving.

RFID wristbands or cards suit a different shape of event. Think festivals, multi-day passes, anywhere people come and go through several points or you want to link entry to cashless payments. You tap and you're through, faster than a scan, and it works even when phones don't. The catch is cost and logistics. You're buying physical tags, distributing them, and accepting that some will be lost. For a one-evening dinner it's overkill. For a weekend festival with three stages it earns its keep.

Then there's face recognition, where the guest's face is the ticket. When it works it's genuinely lovely, people just walk up and in, 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 for government and bank clients especially, plenty of attendees will not want their face stored, full stop, and they're right to ask. So we only ever offer it as a choice, never the only door, we tell people clearly what happens to the image, and we delete it after the event. If you can't promise all that plainly, use a QR code and sleep easy.

A simple way to decide

Short corporate or government event, a few hundred people, on a budget: QR, with a 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 comfortable with it: face, offered alongside QR for anyone who'd rather not.

Whatever you pick, the deciding factor on the day is having a fallback when the first method fails for one guest, because it will, once or twice, and 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.