Digitalizing Loyalty Cards in Tourism

Loyalty cards play an important role in modern customer relationship management, especially in tourism. The most common way to implement loyalty card systems is to use plastic cards, e.g. in form of magnetic cards or chip cards. However, considerable obstacles of current loyalty card systems are high hardware investments for participating retailers, which are even more noticeable in tourism due to the great diversity of potential participants in tourism destinations. This paper presents an approach for digitalizing loyalty cards based on quick response (QR) codes. Both, customer and retailer make use of their mobile phone to present and validate the QR code as digital customer card and offer corresponding discounts and (e.g. tourism or information) services, without the need for additional hardware investments. A prototypical implementation has been evaluated in a real life scenario in a German tourism destination.