How to Create the Perfect Holiday Scavenger Hunt List

Updated: August 08, 2022

So you’ve made a smart decision and realized a scavenger hunt is the perfect holiday team building activity for your group. Now all you have to do is come up with the perfect list of challenges for your team to complete. With Scavify, you can create a variety of challenge types for people to seek out. Below are some ideas for different types of challenges and examples to help get you started.

Photos

Photos are definitely the most popular type of challenge. They capture amazing moments of your team interacting with each other, posing with objects they have hunted down, and often doing goofy things outlined in the challenge.

When thinking about the photo challenges you want to create, the first thing you should consider is what you want out of the resulting photo. Do you just want proof that an object was found? Or do you want your entire team in the photos interacting with the object in a funny way?

For example, you could say “Find the Rocky statue”. Or you could say, “Strike a boxing pose with the Rocky statue”. Only a very slight variation but the photo that will come out will be very different. Whenever possible, try to encourage your team to interact with an object in a creative way, not just locate it.

Holiday example: “Make a snow angel. No snow? Improvise.”

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Videos

Just like photos, videos are fantastic for capturing some of the most fun moments of your team during their hunt. Where photos are great for capturing snapshots and poses, videos are great for capturing more dynamic scenes that have multiple parts or more nuanced displays. If you are involving 3rd parties into the challenge, they are also great for capturing people’s reactions. In these situations, video will be much more powerful (and oftentimes funny) than a photo will do justice. Videos are the perfect medium to capture the creative and imaginative side of your team.

Encourage teams to create videos between 5 – 15 seconds long so that they capture the interaction succinctly. This will make for videos that are easier to watch, as well as share.

Holiday example: “Convince a stranger to sing a holiday carol with you in public.”

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Trivia

No holiday scavenger hunt would be complete without a healthy dose of trivia. When crafting for your trivia challenges, consider questions that will result in your team learning something new, not just answering stock questions. With the holidays there are so many avenues to choose from: history, pop-culture, traditions, religion, popular holiday-related marketing campaigns, famous characters, and so much more. It’s also fun to spice up your questions by converting them into riddles.

Encourage teams to create videos between 5 – 15 seconds long so that they capture the interaction succinctly. This will make for videos that are easier to watch, as well as share.

Holiday example: “In what decade did Coca-Cola start using Santa Claus in advertisements?”

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GPS Check-ins

While photo and video based challenges will likely have your team running around already, GPS check-in challenges are another great way to send your teams to specific locations and verify their visit.

From the biggest cities to the smallest towns, most places come to life during the holidays with festive decorations, seasonal activities, and more. Highlight the best areas for your team to check out and encourage them to explore the best places using these GPS check-in challenge types.

Holiday example: “I’m the tallest decorated tree in a 2 mile radius. Come check me out and check in!”

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Hidden QR Codes

Looking to hide a small object or encourage teams to verify that they have found a specific object? Hidden QR codes are the perfect way to designate the location that teams need to visit. Using the app, once teams have found the designated location related to a QR code challenge they can simply scan the QR code and verify automatically that they have completed the challenge. QR code challenges are also a great way to complement the overall experience by finding and completing an array of different types of challenges. Riddles often make for great holiday team building challenges.

Encourage teams to create videos between 5 – 15 seconds long so that they capture the interaction succinctly. This will make for videos that are easier to watch, as well as share.

Holiday example: “Think like an elf from our Human Resources department during the annual employee summit to find the hidden QR Code to scan.”

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Additional Thoughts

Levels of Difficulty

Providing varying levels of difficulty is highly recommended for your holiday scavenger hunt. Easy challenges get your team off and running. Difficult challenges help separate the leaders from the rest of the pack and push the boundaries of what each team is capable of solving, finding, or answering. You many want to think about the level of difficulty within your challenges as having a bell curve shape. A few easy challenges to start, a core of intermediate difficulty, and a few that really require something extra. Having a broad spectrum of difficulty will help prevent any ties as well, which will make things easier if there are any prizes or rewards for top teams incorporated.

How Many Challenges Should I have?

Not so few that each team completes every challenge with time to spare and not so many that each team barely makes a dent. That is the short, obvious answer. It really depends on the dynamics of your hunt and your teams to identify the right number of challenges. How much time do teams have? How much ground will each team need to cover? These will heavily impact the correct number of challenges for your hunt. Typically we recommend anywhere from 20 – 50 challenges depending on the variables specific to your hunt and teams. A list with 50 – 100 is not out of the question, but over 100 and you will likely start to overwhelm your teams.