What is badge scanning?

Badge scanning covers three distinct operations that look identical in a photograph and are entirely different products.

In practice at an event

Door check-in. A staff member scans arriving attendees against the guest list. The output is an arrivals count and a record of who is on site. This is the most common and the simplest.

Session tracking. Scanners at session room doors record who attended what. It produces genuine attendance data and it costs staffing at every door, which is why most conferences do not do it.

Exhibitor lead capture. An exhibitor scans a visitor’s badge and receives their contact details, usually into a CRM. This is a commercial product sold to exhibitors, and it is the one that generates revenue.

What to look for

Ask which of the three a vendor means, every time. A product that does door check-in does not necessarily do lead retrieval, and the gap matters enormously if your event’s economics depend on exhibitors.

For door check-in specifically, ask what happens on a repeat scan. Returning an error for somebody who already checked in creates a queue; returning “already checked in” does not.

How event67 handles it

event67 does door check-in: scan an attendee’s QR badge at the desk, with a repeat scan returning “already” rather than an error, and a live arrivals count against the guest list for the desk and the console.

It does not do exhibitor lead retrieval, and it does not do per-session badge scanning. Its other QR feature is attendee-to-attendee networking, which is a different actor entirely and must never be described to a sponsor as lead capture.