Platinum Award - Continuous Forms One Simple Solution
A mere five minutes from Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, on the Condado strip nestled betwixt the Atlantic Ocean and the Condado Lagoon, rests the elaborate Condado Plaza Hotel & Casino. Boasting 570 luxurious guest rooms and suites, 27,000 sq. ft. of meeting and conference facilities, five international restaurants and the largest casino in Puerto Rico, the hotel faces a formidable challenge in meeting the needs of guests—specifically the tools required to register those visitors.
Fortunately, Puerto Rico also houses frugal designer Guillermo Zabala, Alpha Business Forms, San Juan, whose creative innovations have been serving the hotel industry in PR for about 20 years. For the past 12 years, Zabala has been catering to hotels specifically through the forms industry. For them he created plastic, registration and pocket cards and check-out forms. They were becoming in-creasingly expensive to manufacture, however, and Zabala's clients needed a less costly option.
Customers approached Zabala and asked him to redesign all of the forms into a single consolidated form. "The challenge was to provide customers with an economical and efficient solution to meet their needs. I finally developed the multiple-use guest register form," Zabala said.
His first version used a plastic card in addition to a form, which, according to Zabala, was extremely practical but difficult to produce. Over the following years, cost increases made it impossible for the hotels to keep using the plastic cards.
Fortunately, it was around this time that integrated cards were introduced to the industry. Zabala used the integrated cards to design a new form. He noted, "Over the past year the Condado has been very satisfied with the reasonable cost of the form."
When Zabala switched to the integrated cards he was faced with the task of finding a manufacturer that could produce what he needed—an 11x7-inch form with several glue lines and pockets. Zabala went to his trusted and familiar supplier, Ward/Kraft, Fort Scott, Kan. "A lot of plants can do the integrated cards, but not in the size and way I needed. Ward/Kraft could, so we went with them," said Zabala.
Zabala modestly insisted that the project wasn't that difficult. "What I was creating already existed in parts. It was just a matter of putting together what I had in such a way that the information could still be printed on it. Really, the biggest challenge for me came after I designed the form. The question then was about which manufacturer could do it," he quipped.
Manufacturer: Ward/Kraft, Fort Scott, Kan.
Press: 14-inch Stevens four-color.
Paper: Mead, Georgia Pacific & Stratatac.
By Sarah Lerow