Overview
This case study describes a Turkish Aegean coastal hotel — 120 rooms, a main restaurant, a pool bar, and a beach service operation — that replaced printed menus with a multilingual digital QR menu system ahead of the 2025 summer season.
The property had operated with printed menus in Turkish only, updated once per year. International guests — primarily German, British, and Russian — accounted for approximately 65% of occupancy. F&B revenue per guest was tracked against the previous two seasons as the primary success metric.
*Note: This case study describes a representative operation based on outcomes observed across QR Menu deployments. Property and staff details are not attributed.*
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The situation before the transition
Menu and operational context
The hotel's main restaurant seated 120 covers with an average of 60–80 covers per dinner service during peak season. The pool bar operated 08:00–20:00 serving 80–120 guests daily. Beach service operated through roving staff with a laminated one-page menu card.
The existing printed menu had the following characteristics:
- Turkish language only
- Updated once per year before the season
- No photos
- 68 items across starters, mains, desserts, and beverages
- No allergen information beyond what staff communicated verbally
The combination of a single-language menu and no visual presentation created a recurring pattern: international guests defaulted to the dishes they recognised by name — typically grilled meats and salads — and rarely ordered from the starters, desserts, or cocktail sections.
The F&B manager estimated informally that non-Turkish-speaking guests spent approximately 30–40% less per head than Turkish-speaking guests, with the gap concentrated in secondary categories.
The reprint problem
Over the previous season, the hotel had made three unplanned reprints: a price adjustment in May, a supplier change that affected two dishes in July, and a correction to an item description that had caused recurring complaints. Each reprint across 80 copies cost approximately ₺4,000–6,000 including design fees. The annual printed menu cost including the main print run and three ad-hoc reprints was approximately ₺28,000.
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The transition
Platform and setup
The hotel implemented QR Menu by AKORNET across three service areas: the main restaurant, the pool bar, and beach service.
Setup was completed over three weeks:
Week 1. Menu data entry — all 68 restaurant items and 34 pool bar items entered with descriptions, prices, and allergen flags in Turkish. Existing menu copy was used as the base with expanded descriptions added for the top 20 items by historical order volume.
Week 2. Food photography — a local photographer shot all 68 restaurant items over four days. Pool bar items were shot in two days. The photography cost was ₺18,000 — the largest single line item in the transition.
Week 3. Translation into German, English, and Russian using the platform's translation workflow, with native speaker review for German and Russian. QR code production — acrylic stands for restaurant tables (80 units), weatherproof table tents for pool sunbeds (60 units), and laminated cards for beach service staff (20 units).
Staff training required a half-day session focused on the dashboard — how to mark items unavailable, make price updates, and review the scan analytics.
Total transition cost
Previous annual printed menu cost: ₺28,000. First-year digital cost: ₺42,400 — a ₺14,400 premium. From year two, the annual cost drops to ₺14,400 (platform subscription only) versus ₺28,000+ for print, representing a ₺13,600+ annual saving plus zero reprint costs for any mid-season changes.
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Measured outcomes
F&B revenue per guest
The hotel tracked F&B revenue per occupied room-night across the season, excluding all-inclusive packages to isolate à la carte spending. Comparison was made against the same period in the previous two seasons.
The 23% increase over 2024 represents the combined effect of multilingual access, photo-driven upsell, and real-time menu accuracy. The F&B manager attributed approximately half the increase to international guest ordering behaviour and half to the dessert and cocktail upsell effect visible in the order mix.
Category-level order mix change
The clearest signal was in secondary categories — the items that require a guest to choose rather than default:
Mains — the category guests order regardless of menu comprehension — showed no meaningful change. The categories that require active discovery showed the largest increases.
Staff workload
Staff were asked to estimate the time saved on menu explanations per service. The estimate across front-of-house staff averaged 3–5 minutes per table. For a service with 70 covers across 35 tables, this represented approximately 1.75–2.9 hours of staff time returned to service quality and floor efficiency per dinner service.
There were no formal controls on this measurement — it is a reported estimate, not a timed study. The direction of effect was consistent across all staff surveyed.
Physical menu requests
15 printed menus were kept for the season. Physical menu requests averaged 5 per day across a 200+ cover operation — approximately 2.5% of covers. The requests came predominantly from older Turkish guests. No international guests requested a physical menu.
In-season updates
The hotel made 14 menu changes during the season — price adjustments, item additions and removals, and a full pool bar menu refresh in August when a new bar manager joined. None required a reprint or a design fee. Total time for all 14 updates: approximately 2 hours across the season.
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What drove the results
The outcomes reflect three compounding effects:
Multilingual access. International guests who could read the menu in their own language ordered from the full menu rather than defaulting to recognisable items. The German-speaking segment showed the largest absolute change in per-head spend.
Visual presentation. Photos of desserts and cocktails converted browsers into orderers. A guest who can see a dessert is more likely to order it than a guest reading "Chocolate Lava Cake" in a list. The 72% increase in dessert order rate reflects this directly.
Real-time accuracy. A menu that is always current — no sold-out items listed, no outdated prices — reduces the table interactions that slow service and create friction. Guests who order items that turn out to be unavailable are a specific source of negative sentiment; eliminating this from 14 updates' worth of changes across the season has a compounding effect on service quality.
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Summary
The transition from printed to digital QR menus produced a 23% increase in F&B revenue per guest-night for this property, with the effect concentrated in secondary categories — starters, desserts, and cocktails — and driven by multilingual access for international guests and photo-driven discovery.
The first-year cost premium over printed menus (₺14,400) was recovered within the first month of the season at the measured revenue uplift. From year two, the digital system is both cheaper than print and generates higher revenue.
Ready to run the same analysis for your property? The hotel QR menu setup checklist covers the full transition step by step. Get started at qrmenu.akor.net →