Most of us have moved exhibitors over to phone-based QR scanning. It works well when everything cooperates, but the second the venue network gets congested or someone’s battery hits 5%, the complaints start rolling in.

Curious how other event teams are handling this with tools like Cvent Lead Capture, Whova, or Eventify.

Since these platforms rely on exhibitor-owned phones and the venue’s Wi-Fi (which sits outside the organizer’s direct control), what practical workarounds are you using?

Do you still provide any backup hardware?

Or is everyone fully expected to use their own phones now?

Any tips that actually reduce the last-minute chaos?

Would love to hear what’s working for you.

For smaller events, we can usually get by with a laptop and printed attendee list. But once the numbers start climbing, the bottlenecks become pretty obvious, especially when badges have to be printed on site.

Last year, scanning wasn’t really the issue for us. The bigger problem was the manual badge process, which created a second queue at check in.

Curious to hear from others, at what point did you feel dedicated check in software became necessary? And did having on site badge printing actually make much of a difference?