New program helps visitors to learn more about the city.
Dallas has gone mobile in its efforts to draw tourists off the beaten path by adding a QR code scavenger hunt to its city experience, allowing them to explore areas that they would not otherwise see.
Encouraging visitors away from the standard tourist attractions has always presented a challenge.
Now that many tourists have something important in common – smartphones – it has presented urban centers with a tremendous opportunity to communicate with them. Dallas, for one, is not about to look a gift horse in the mouth. The QR code signage is helping visitors to the city to gain a great deal more information about various parts of town. The more knowledgeable an individual is about an area, the more likely he or she is to feel comfortable enough to check it out.
QR code use is the ideal way to share this information.
This helps individuals to know that there is a great deal more to a city than its tourist hot spots. Though Dallas is not hoping that the QR code use will take people away from those landmarks, what it does hope to achieve is that people entering the city will start to see more than those few specific locations.
The program is called the QR code SCANVenger Hunt. It allows visitors to the city to play a game where they must scan the barcodes at various different locations found throughout Dallas. When they perform a scan, they are provided with a trivia question or a task that must be completed. Each time they answer correctly or finish the required activity, they gain points. Those can be accumulated in order to earn prizes.
Among the locations included in the SCANVenger Hunt are The Cowboys Stadium, the Sixth Floor Museum, The Omni Dallas Hotel, Texas Motor Speedway, and the Great American Golf Course. Though these are already common tourist landmarks, the QR code use helps to make the tourists more familiar with the surrounding areas, and ensures that instead of sticking to only one or two of their locations, the visits occur throughout the city.
