QR Codes still exist as a tool for Tourism

By
Gabriela Vega
Dayris Martinez

Personally I thought the QR Codes were going to disappear because from my point of view nobody used them anymore. The thing is that I was completely wrong! If you are not familiar with the term It consists of black squares arranged in a square grid on a white background, which can be read by an imaging device such as a camera, and processed using an app until the image can be appropriately interpreted. (Thanks Wikipedia)

(Extract from google.com)

I had a IT Tourism class this week and my professor explained that since the tourism industry is run by small and medium businesses or is family owned, those people don't really have much budget to spend on marketing so the QR code is a perfect tool to advertise their hotels or even locations for a cheap price. That statement really made sense to me but still don't completely convinced I looked up for more information about the topic. 

The first problem that I saw, was that for using the QR Codes you used to have to download an app to read those codes, for me that was extremely unifficient and since we are a generation that don't have time for that and we want all the information as fast as possible it made sense that people stopped using them but the thing is that new phones right now have already that kind of app (I didn't know this, time to buy a new phone!!) so the tourism industry is using again the QR Codes, a good example of how can using this kind of tools help to your hotel or in this casa your travel destination is Rio de Janeiro. 

By itself Rio is a really an exotic destination but not many people know exactly what to do there or don't speak the language so the government of Brazil saw this as a big problem and they came with a really cool solution, use QR Codes by putting them into pavements to guide tourists around the city. The Codes were built with the same stones used to decorate the pavements with traditional mosaic designs. The city installed 30 codes at beaches and historic sites offering tourists more information about the most visited spots an in many languages. 

The launch attracted more users for sure, but Rio let's not give all the credit to the Brazilians, They weren't the first ones to use this actually they got the idea from Portugal, where similar pavement QR codes were placed around the city months before. Thanks Portugal!  

Cool right? Let's all start to consider QR Codes again!