Magnetic stripe cards used on luxury liners

September 2002 Access Control & Identity Management

Long gone are the days of paper badges and paper boarding passes at Star Cruise Lines in Singapore. Today, Star Cruises prints and encodes its own plastic magnetic stripe cards on land and sea to serve its customers better and create increased efficiencies for itself. During peak seasons and school holidays, the cruise line prints 2000 cards per printer per week. In addition to passenger passes, Star Cruises also prints its own employee badges.

"We are using an estimated 150 Eltron printers at the present moment," reports Judy Koh, senior manager, Embarkation. "We use magnetic stripe cards to issue a boarding pass that can be used to interface with many applications including point of sale, billing, tracking and access control.

"At least 20 locations use these printers," Koh relates. "They are used on land, as well as on the ships. On some of the bigger ships, we use about 10 Zebra Eltron P300/P310 printers. On the medium-sized vessels, we use about five printers and on the smaller ships, we use two. Normally, printing is done one day before the passengers arrive at the ship. We print about 9000 cards and these cards become the permanent boarding access cards. We also print approximately 1000 cards on board the ships. These are for on-demand replacements of lost and defective cards. We also print about 300 temporary boarding access cards for every cruise, for passengers who turn up at the ship at the last minute."

P310 card printer

The Zebra Eltron P310 prints single-side, high resolution, edge-to-edge, full colour personalised plastic cards. Its high capacity, auto-synchronised ribbon system eliminates the need for operator intervention. An easy to change, self-cleaning cartridge thoroughly removes dust on cards before printing.

For more information: Eltron, 011 787 0355.





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