Check-in is the first thing attendees experience and the easiest thing to get wrong. Desk maths, QR scanning, badge printing, and the offline plan for when the wifi goes.
Check-in is the only part of your event that every single attendee experiences, and it happens while they are tired, carrying a bag and slightly unsure they are in the right place. A twenty-minute queue is the tone of the whole morning.
A scanned check-in takes 15–25 seconds when the data is clean. That is roughly 150 people per station per hour. So:
The variable that matters is not the total; it is the arrival curve. Pull last year's check-in timestamps and look at the peak fifteen minutes. If you have no history, assume half your attendees arrive in the thirty minutes before the opening session.
One person in five hundred will have a genuinely awkward case: registered under a different email, paid but not confirmed, brought a colleague. Solving that at the front of a queue stops the queue. Put a separate "help" position to one side and move problems to it immediately — the rule for desk staff is never debug in the line.
The code should be in the confirmation and in the day-before reminder, in the email body rather than in a PDF attachment nobody can open on a phone in a lobby. Repeat the wifi name, the room and the start time in the same message. That email is doing more work than your signage.
Most mid-size events are better served by print-on-demand plus pre-printed badges for VIPs and speakers. See event badge design for what goes on them.
One line feeding several stations moves faster than a line per station and removes the "I picked the wrong queue" annoyance. Keep the badge collection point past the scanning point so people step out of the flow, and put a table for bags twenty metres beyond that so nobody stops in the doorway.
Network failure at a registration desk is the most common operational incident at events. Three things, prepared the evening before:
More scenarios in event risk management.
Checked-in against registered, updating live, tells you when to redeploy staff to the floor. Gathervo shows that in the dashboard and records the timestamps you will want next year. Try it free, or read self check-in kiosks to see whether you can skip the desk entirely.
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