QR code ideas: where a code that never expires earns its place

QR code ideas by situation

Hospitality. Restaurants and cafés put a menu code on every table, a Wi-Fi code by the till, and a Google review code on the receipt or the door. Hotels and holiday lets add a Wi-Fi card in the room and a code to house rules or local recommendations. These codes are printed once and touched by thousands of hands, which is exactly the situation where a dynamic code’s expiry hurts most.

Marketing. Posters, flyers, stickers, product packaging, real-estate yard signs and shop windows all carry codes to a landing page, a video, a playlist or a social profile. The size guide matters here more than anywhere: a poster read from two metres needs a code five times bigger than a flyer in the hand.

Personal and events. Wedding invitations link to an RSVP form or a shared photo album; event tickets carry a link or a booking reference; donation codes go on collection boxes and order-of-service sheets. Guests keep these things, so the code should keep working for as long as they do.

Print materials. Business cards, résumés, email signatures and T-shirts each have a page of their own because their constraints differ: a card needs a small, dense contact code, a résumé needs a link that will still work after the interview, and fabric needs a bold, simple pattern that survives stretching.

Offices. Feedback forms, Google Forms, Zoom links and PDFs cover the internal jobs: a survey at reception, a meeting link on a notice board, a safety document on a machine.

How to choose

Pick the page that matches the physical thing, not just the destination. Each use-case page prefills the right content type, labels the main field for that job (for example Google review link or Menu link), explains how to obtain the link first, and sets a sensible default style and error correction. If nothing fits exactly, the URL generator on the home page handles any web address, and the types hub covers content that is not a link at all.

Whatever you choose, point the code at a page you control where you can, so that what sits behind the code can change while the print stays the same. And print one copy to test from the real distance before ordering the rest; the size guide says how big.