Verified-Redemption Courtesies: Guide for Restaurants

What is a verified-redemption courtesy?

A courtesy is a perk your restaurant offers — a drink, an entry, a discount — to attract new customers, delivered via QR and redeemed on site. The partner network and local creators recommend it to travelers and to people in the city, and you only pay when someone actually redeems it.

This is what Vórax, Skyline's tool for venues, solves: new customers for restaurants, rooftops and clubs, where you publish a courtesy, the network recommends it, and you only pay per verified redemption.

Unlike a traditional marketing campaign or a generic affiliate program where you pay for clicks or exposure, here money only moves when there is a real person, in your venue, spending. No invoices for impressions that never turned into occupied tables.

An example: a restaurant in Provenza publishes a courtesy for "free appetizer with two main courses ordered." An ambassador in the network sees it on their page, recommends it to a traveler who has it in their itinerary, and that traveler arrives, shows the QR, orders and pays, and the restaurant pays the commission only for that redemption. That is the full cycle, and this guide walks through it.

Why does "only pay per redemption" change the rules?

The logic is simple: free to start; you only pay per redeemed courtesy. There is no fixed monthly fee for publishing, no charge for exposure or reach. Your restaurant's spend is directly tied to a measurable outcome: a person who showed up and spent money.

This is different from:

• Marketing agencies: charge for management, with or without measurable results.
• Generic affiliate programs: usually require technical setup, manual tracking and separate reconciliation.
• Paid social ads: you pay per click or impression, not per person who actually walks into your venue.

For a restaurant already running on tight margins, being able to say "this month I spent X on new customers because X people redeemed" is a far more honest way to budget than estimating the return of a campaign.

How do you design a courtesy that actually works?

Before publishing anything, your restaurant decides what to offer and under what conditions. The courtesy can be a drink, an entry or a discount, and you control several pieces of it:

1. What you offer

Think of something that draws people in without giving away your entire margin. A welcome drink, entry to the rooftop, a complimentary dessert with a purchase. The goal is not to give away the whole experience, but to give a concrete reason to choose your venue over another.

2. What you pay per redemption

The venue sets the commission it pays whoever brings customers. This means you control how much you're willing to pay for each verified new customer. You can adjust that commission based on how the courtesy is performing.

3. Whether it requires a minimum group

A courtesy can require a minimum group and activate through the traveler app's group meetups. If your rooftop works better with groups of four or more, you can configure the courtesy to only activate in that scenario, tapping into the group meetups already organized by the Miradores Medellín traveler app.

4. Whether it requires prior booking

This is where many venues make the mistake of thinking a QR code means arrivals without any control. It doesn't have to.

How does prior booking work for a courtesy?

Courtesies with prior booking let the traveler leave their WhatsApp and a date, and the venue confirms from its panel; it gets notified by email and WhatsApp. This is key for a restaurant with limited capacity, or a rooftop that wants to control the flow of people on certain days.

An example: a rooftop in El Poblado publishes a "welcome cocktail" courtesy but requires prior booking because its capacity fills up fast on Fridays. The interested traveler leaves their WhatsApp and the date they want to go. The venue checks its panel, confirms if there's space, and both the traveler and the venue get notified by email and WhatsApp. No last-minute surprises, no people showing up with no room available.

This gives your restaurant a layer of control that a plain printed coupon or a generic discount QR never had.

How is the QR issued and redeemed?

Once the traveler decides to use the courtesy — with or without prior booking — the redemption process runs automatically from start to finish.

Automatic issuing, confirmation and redemption: the traveler gets a QR, the venue scans it (optional 4-digit code) and there is no double redemption.

Step by step at your venue

1. The traveler arrives and shows the QR from their phone.
2. Your team scans it with the Vórax panel.
3. If you enabled the optional 4-digit code when scanning, you ask for it as an extra verification layer.
4. The system marks the courtesy as used. It cannot be redeemed twice.

This removes the classic problem of paper coupons or screenshot discounts: someone showing the same coupon multiple times, or sharing it with someone who shouldn't have access to it. With the QR tied to that specific person and that specific redemption, the courtesy gets consumed exactly once.

What happens after redemption: how is spending verified?

Here is the part that sets Vórax apart from simply "giving things away and hoping people buy more." After redemption, the venue records people served and invoice-verified spending, and sees the benefit per courtesy.

This means your restaurant doesn't just know how many people redeemed the courtesy, but how much they actually spent, backed by that table's invoice. With that, you can calculate, courtesy by courtesy, whether the acquisition cost is worth it against the spending it generated.

For a restaurant, this is the difference between "I gave away ten entries and I don't know if it worked" and "I gave away ten entries, seven showed up, and those seven left invoice-verified spending that far outweighed the commission paid."

How does the venue know who brought each customer?

Every redemption stays tied to its origin. Each referral shows who sent it: partner ranking by people and spending. This means you can see, inside the panel, which ambassadors, creators or network partners are bringing you more people and more spending.

Why this matters for your restaurant

If an ambassador in the network consistently brings you customers with good spending, you can decide to raise their commission, prioritize their recommendations, or simply recognize that channel works for your type of venue. If another partner brings few people or low spending, you have objective data to adjust strategy, without guessing.

This attribution also solves a historic problem with word-of-mouth marketing: you never really knew who generated the sale. With Vórax, every redemption shows its exact origin.

How does settlement with the partners who bring you customers work?

At the end of the month (or whatever period you define), your restaurant needs to pay each partner the commission they earned from the redemptions they originated. This is where many venues drown in spreadsheets and scattered WhatsApp messages trying to reconstruct who brought whom.

Vórax solves this with settlement with partners without spreadsheets: a WhatsApp-ready statement and payment history.

How it looks in practice

• The panel already has every redemption logged with its originating partner.
• At the close of the period, the system generates the statement for each partner.
• That statement is ready to send directly via WhatsApp.
• Payment history is stored, with no need to reconstruct it manually every month.

For a restaurant with several active partners — an ambassador, a couple of local creators, maybe a tour guide who also recommends the venue — this saves hours of administrative work that used to go into reconciling numbers by hand.

What is Vórax Creators and how does it fit into the cycle?

Beyond the ambassador network, your restaurant can activate visits from verified local creators from the Miradores Álbum. This is called Vórax Creators: 4 monthly visits from verified local creators of the Miradores Álbum, posts tagged with the venue's location, a Google review with photo within 72 hours and usage rights on the material.

In concrete numbers: that's 4 creators per month visiting your venue, each leaving a Google review with photo within 72 hours. On top of that, creator scheduling and reminders are automatic via WhatsApp; redemptions and spending per post show in the panel.

This means that, in addition to the direct recommendation via courtesy, your restaurant also gains real visual content, tagged with your location and fresh reviews, all within the same redemption and attribution system.

Comparison: verified-redemption courtesy vs. other ways to bring in new customers

What does your restaurant need to get started?

You don't need complex infrastructure. The process starts when you publish your first courtesy inside Vórax, set the commission you're willing to pay, decide whether it requires prior booking or a minimum group, and enable QR scanning at your point of service. From there, the partner network and local creators do the work of recommending, and your team only needs to scan and record verified spending when the person shows up.

A real case shows the potential: a restaurant in Provenza got 32 customers from 9 redemptions in a month. That shows a single redemption can bring in groups, not just individuals, and that the effect of a well-designed courtesy multiplies beyond the redemption count itself.

Next step

If your restaurant, rooftop or club wants to start getting new customers without paying upfront, the first step is to publish your first courtesy on Vórax and set the commission you're willing to pay per verified redemption.