It is 9 AM on a Saturday. Your youth soccer tournament is about to kick off. You have 12 fields, 80 teams, 400 parents, and three volunteers at the information booth.
By 9:15, the line at that booth is already ten people deep.
The first person wants to know which field their team is on. The second wants to find the bathrooms. The third cannot locate their bracket. The fourth is asking whether the snack bar is open. Three of those four things were in the email you sent on Wednesday. Nobody read it.
This is the information booth trap. And event organizers have been stuck in it for decades.
Information booths make sense in theory. You create a central place for questions. Volunteers staff it. Problems get solved.
In practice, they create three problems that compound throughout the day.
They concentrate demand. One central point for questions means every confused attendee goes to the same place. The queue grows fastest in the first hour, when everyone arrives at once and wants to confirm the same basic things.
They require knowledgeable volunteers. Your volunteers are generous with their time. But they may not know every detail. "I think the parking is over there?" is not a confidence-inspiring answer. The moment someone gets wrong information, trust erodes — and they come back to verify.
They go offline. Your booth is open from 9 AM to 5 PM. But questions about your event start three days before and continue for hours after. The booth cannot help the parent asking at 11 PM the night before where check-in is. It cannot help the attendee who is lost in the parking lot before the venue is even open.
Here is what a growing number of event organizers have quietly started doing instead.
They create a chatbot for their event. The bot knows everything: schedules, rules, field locations, parking, sign-in procedures, bracket information, emergency contacts, snack bar hours. Whatever questions come up year after year.
Then they take that bot's link, generate a QR code, and print it.
A small card on every table. A sign at the entrance. A code printed in the program. A sticker on the water station.
Attendees pull out their phones, scan the code, and type their question — or tap a suggested one. The answer appears in seconds.
No queue. No volunteer needed. No "I'm not sure, let me check."
Marcus organizes a regional martial arts tournament twice a year — 150 competitors from six states, plus families and coaches. For years, two people staffed an information table near the entrance. They answered the same questions hundreds of times.
Last fall, he added a printed QR code to every numbered table in the venue. The code linked to his Boty chatbot, which he had set up to answer 15 common questions about the day.
"The first hour, people still came to the table out of habit," he said. "But once word spread that you could just scan the thing on the table, the foot traffic basically stopped. My two volunteers were free to handle actual problems — a bracket dispute, an injured competitor, a late arrival that needed rescheduling. The bot handled everything else."
The weekly summary he received the following Monday showed 312 conversations that day. The most common question was about restroom locations — something he had not thought to add. He updated the bot for the next event.
A community running event tried something similar for their annual 5K race. They skipped the help tent entirely. Instead, they printed QR codes for every sign at the start and finish area, and placed them at water stations along the route.
The organizer was nervous going in. What if people needed help and there was nobody to ask?
What she found: most attendees preferred scanning to asking. The questions they had were simple. Map of the course. Parking validation. Where to pick up medals. T-shirt sizes available. These were questions the bot could answer in three seconds.
Two volunteers who would have staffed the help tent spent the morning cheering runners across the finish line instead. The event ran smoother. The team went home less exhausted.
Step 1: Build your event bot.
Create a Boty chatbot and teach it everything about your event. Add answers to every question you have ever been asked at check-in: parking, schedule, rules, bathroom locations, sign-in procedures, emergency contacts, refund policy, what to bring. If you have explained something twelve times at past events, it belongs in the bot.
Step 2: Enable suggested questions.
Add three to five suggested questions that appear when someone opens the chat: "Where do I park?" "What time does registration open?" "Where is my team playing?" These are conversation starters that signal immediately what the bot can help with.
Step 3: Get your bot's shareable link.
Every Boty bot has a link you can share anywhere. That is the link that goes into your QR code.
Step 4: Generate your QR code.
Any free QR code generator online will turn that link into a printable image. Paste your link, download the image, drop it into a Word doc or design tool, and print. Cards, signs, programs — whatever fits your event.
Step 5: Tell people what it is.
Add a single line next to the code: "Questions about today's event? Scan for instant answers." That is enough. People know what QR codes do. They will scan.
When attendees can get answers themselves, the feel of an event changes. Less confusion in the first hour. Less friction at registration. Fewer volunteers fielding the same question for the hundredth time.
Your information booth becomes optional. The attendee who used to wander around looking for someone to ask becomes the attendee who scans a code, gets an answer in ten seconds, and moves on with their day.
It is not a dramatic transformation. It is a small one. But small changes that multiply across every attendee and every question of your event add up to something noticeably different — for your attendees and for your team.
Your next event will have confused people. That is unavoidable. But it does not have to have confused people standing in a queue for someone who might not know the answer either.
A printed QR code on a small card can fix that. Before your next event.
Set up your event bot with Boty in minutes — no technical knowledge needed. Add your event details, turn on suggested questions, grab the link, and print the code. See what happens when your information booth fits on a business card.