Hotel QR code menu: one property, several kitchens

A hotel QR code menu has a harder job than a restaurant's, and it fails for reasons a restaurant never meets.

A restaurant has one kitchen, one room and one set of hours. A guest scans, reads, orders. A hotel has a lobby cafe, a pool deck, a dining room, a lounge and several hundred bedrooms, each with different hours and a different person carrying the tray. The same square in the wrong place sends a club sandwich to an empty sunbed.

This article is about the questions a hotel menu has to answer before it shows anybody a dish, and how to set one up so the answers are automatic.

A hotel is several restaurants wearing one name

Even a mid-sized property runs more than one kitchen. Symphony Style Hotel Kuwait, for example, lists Choco Cafe for coffee and chocolate and Cucina for Italian as separate places with separate identities, in the same building.

Larger properties in Salmiya and Kuwait City run five, six or seven outlets, plus room service that runs when most of them are shut. If you treat that as one hotel menu, you get a document nobody can use: half the page is closed, the prices differ by outlet, and the guest has to work out which part applies to the chair they are sitting in.

The fix is not a longer menu. It is a separate menu per outlet, each with its own hours, and a different code in each place.

Three questions the code must answer first

Where is this guest sitting? The lobby, the pool, room 812. This is the only question a paper menu never had to answer, because a waiter could see the guest.

What is open right now? At 1am the dining room is closed and room service is not. A menu that shows the closed one is a complaint waiting to happen.

Who takes it there? A tray to a bedroom, a plate to a lounger and a coffee to a table in the lobby are three different journeys with three different people.

Get all three right and the guest never thinks about the system at all. Get the first one wrong and everything after it is guesswork.

The room number problem

There are two ways to know which room ordered.

Ask the guest to type it, which they will get wrong at some point, and which adds a step at exactly the moment they were about to spend money.

Or make the code itself carry the answer, so a code stuck inside room 812 can only ever produce an order from room 812. This is the same trick a restaurant uses for table numbers, and it is the one worth the extra printing.

The second way costs more to set up. You print a different card for every bedroom instead of one card for the whole floor. It is worth doing, because it removes the single most common error in room dining and it makes the order arrive with an address rather than a claim.

The card has to survive the room

A code in a bedroom lives on a desk with a coffee cup on it. The good news is the format itself is unusually tough. QR codes carry four error correction levels, and at the highest, level H restores 30% of a damaged or dirty code, with level L at 7%. Ask whoever prints your cards to use a higher level for anything that will be handled daily.

Print it large enough for a phone held at arm's length, keep a clear white border around it, and never print it on a glossy card that throws the ceiling light straight back into the camera. Matt card, good contrast, in the light. Qr code cafe covers the same practical points for a smaller room.

How a hotel would set this up with Get Menu

We are an ordering system, not a property management system, and that shapes what fits.

Each outlet is set up on its own, with its own menu, its own prices and its own opening hours, and staff logins that only see the outlet they work in. The pool bar closing at sunset does not close the dining room.

Your pages sit on your own address on getmenu.ae, included in every plan, with 12 page layouts so a bar menu and a breakfast menu do not have to look the same.

A code is generated for every table, and the same mechanism covers a bedroom, a lounger or a booth. There is a designer so the printed card carries your colours instead of a plain black square, and a print pack is emailed to you ready for the printer.

The menu holds real choices. Options and add-ons carry their own prices, and choices can be made required, so nobody sends through a steak with no cooking preference. Item names and descriptions can be written in Arabic as well as English, which matters in a building where half the guests read one and half read the other.

Counts per item fall as orders come in, so a kitchen that has four portions of the sea bass left at eleven at night can stop selling the fifth without anybody remembering to. Every line is priced again from your live menu at checkout, so an outlet that changed a price in the afternoon charges the new one in the evening.

When the order is placed, a confirmation reaches the customer within about 2 seconds, a ticket lands in the outlet's own WhatsApp group, and where something has to travel, a link goes to the people delivering it. That link works without an account, which matters for casual staff who will not be given a login. Every message is logged with whether it arrived.

For a hotel with a regular local trade in its cafe or lounge, there are stamps and tiers your regulars grow into, with a card that lives in Google Wallet and updates itself. Apple Wallet is built and waiting on a certificate. Month end brings invoices carrying your tax registration number as a PDF, and a sales dashboard by day, item and outlet.

"The first hotel question is always about the room number, and it is the right question. If the order does not carry where it is going, everything clever after that just delivers the wrong thing faster." — Agha Shah Zaman, co-founder of Get Menu

Where we stop, and hotels should read this part twice

We do not charge to the room. There is no link to a property management system and no folio posting, so a room service order placed through us is settled the way any other order is, in cash or on your own card machine at the door of the room. If charging to the folio is a requirement, this is the wrong tool for room dining and a reasonable one for your outlets.

There are no online payments at all, which also means no card details exist anywhere in the system.

There is no scheduled ordering and no pre-order, so a guest cannot book breakfast for seven the next morning through the menu. There is no collection order type either.

And we are not a cash register or a fiscal receipt printer. Whatever your outlets use at the counter today stays.

A trial that does not need the whole hotel

Start with one outlet, and pick the one that annoys you most. Usually the pool or the lobby cafe, because both involve staff walking a long way to find out whether anybody wants anything.

Print codes for that area only. Load its real menu with real options and real prices, and set its real hours.

Run it for a fortnight, then compare two numbers against the same fortnight last month: orders taken, and complaints about something arriving in the wrong place. If both move the right way, add the next outlet.

QR code menu explains the printing and scanning side in more depth, and restaurant management software covers what else usually sits around an ordering system. The trial runs 15 days, needs no card details to begin, and takes 0% of what you sell.

Frequently asked questions

Can guests charge food to their room bill?

No. We do not connect to a property management system, so there is no folio posting. Orders are settled in cash or on your card machine when the food is handed over.

Can each outlet have its own menu and hours?

Yes. Each one is set up separately with its own menu, prices, opening hours and staff logins, so one outlet closing does not affect another.

Does every bedroom need its own printed code?

It is the better way to do it, because the code then carries the room number and the guest types nothing. A shared code with a room number field also works and costs less to print.

How do customers pay?

Cash or your card machine when the order is delivered. There are no online payments, so no card details are stored anywhere.

Can the menu be in Arabic?

Yes. Item names and descriptions can be written in Arabic alongside English, which is worth doing in a hotel where guests arrive from several countries.