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You are away on a business trip and need a document from your home office. Overnight mail won't help: you need it right away.

Although ZapMail is no longer an option, there is still a way to get the materials quickly. A new system, now in place at more than 400 hotels in the United States, enables you to transmit documents, diagrams, or photographs between your hotel and your office. Fed into a facsimile (or fax) machine at one end, the documents can be sent over telephone lines to another fix machine at almost any location in the world. It all takes about 30 seconds.

The system is owned by Hotelecopy Inc., in Miami. Its founder, W. Edd Helms Jr., says he got the idea for Hotelecopy from a bitter experience two years ago. "I was on the road and lost a major bid because I couldn't retrieve information fast enough from my office."

Either the origin or destination of the document must be a hotel that subscribes to the Hotelecopy network. Among the chains that subscribe are Hilton, Radisson, Ritz-Carlton, and Four Seasons. Transmission charges are the same everywhere: $9 per 10 pages for a hotel guest, $12 for others.