Qr Codes - Study Of Their Use In Tourism Advertising

The development of intelligent technologies, as well as the continuous increase in the number of mobile device users worldwide, have generated significant behavioural changes for individuals; companies in turn have had to accept these behavioural changes from the demand profile and adopt innovative differentiation solutions in the global competitive environment; Consequently, tourism, as one of the most adaptable industries to new technologies, has noticed the major changes induced in online and mobile advertising; Also, in order to create competitive advantages, travel companies have constantly tried to provide innovative set of tools dedicated to tourists, used on the one hand for advertising, and on the other hand, as a support for tourists in travels; in the traditional and digital daily landscape, QR codes have already become very common images for everyone and obviously for tourists; these codes have had, over time, various uses in tourism; so these codes can be found either as dynamic tools to attract potential consumers from the traditional environment into the online environment or as an advertising tool for tourist destinations or as components in various advertising mixes or in gamification solutions in tourism, etc.; starting from these issues, this article presents a study on the use of QR codes in tourism advertising; to obtain a more complex picture, two important segments of the tourism market were considered, namely: individual users as tourists and travel companies as users of QR codes in advertising; we believe that the results obtained can provide useful information for both tourism and advertising companies, but also for tourists as final beneficiaries of tourist services.