Royal Mail sending postcards half around the globe

Thomas__

This is probably more a trivial thing, but maybe someone else has experienced the same in recent time, cos this never happened before.

I´ve spent a couple of days of holiday in Oxford, England at the last week of April this year. As tourists do, I bought some postcards and stamps too for sending them to Germany. All addressed correctly, "By Airmail" written down as well, the stamp put on each of them and put it in those red piller post boxes in Oxford. No big deal at all and normally, mail from the UK to Germany takes five to seven days. I was Long back home and wondered after 14 days where those postcards are as they haven´t arrived after the average delivery time. It took further weeks, nothing. But then, some two weeks ago, the first arrived (after 11 weeks since I despatched them). I looked at the stamp on the postcard and find a sticker that reads "tax paid" and some PO Box in the Philippines. The value of the poststamp was blackened out and the sticker from the Philippines put over the stamp. Now I know that took it so long to have the postcard delivered. The UK Royal Post must have sorted all the tourist postcards to send them to the Philippines to have them sorted for delivery to Germany. The last two arrived on Wednesday this week, making it three months for delivery and when I think about the efforts and the costs that are involved in this new developed procedure to send postcards half around the globe and back again to Europe, I am really "surprised" and I wonder that this nonsense means anyway (i.e. boycotting the continent, being short of staff in Royal Mail Distribution centres?)

Maybe others have made such similar experiences as well and if so, I would like to know and more so, if this might happened to postcards addressed to any address in Ireland, which is even closer to England than my country.

I just liked to share this story in case someone likes to send some postcards from the UK and wonders where they are left. The whole story sounds ridiculous, but if it weren´t true, I wouldn´t have bothered to write in on here at all. Other mail from the UK arrived within the usual time frame, but not the most trivial things many tourists send back home.

Samaris

That is an epic journey!

I do remember sending a birthday card to my mother from England to Ireland a few years back. It took just under four months to get to her, and arrived just in time for my brother's birthday.

Widdershins

Ive had numerous things 'lost' in the post recently. A book coming from the UK once went via Sweden.

mahamageehad

My sister was living in Mallorca for a while last Spring and I wanted to send her some Easter goodies. I sent them a week ahead of time and they arrived almost 8 weeks later, the day before she moved out, having detoured through the Maldives. I like to think some postman turned up with a hangover that morning and somehow read the name wrong! :P

razorblunt

Friend of mine posted a charger I left in his gaff, in Dublin, to me in Scotland. Took a fortnight and seemed to be routed through Germany based on the stamps.

my3cents

Old story but wife was waiting for dated tickets from the UK that arrived just in time by courier after complaining that the originals hadn't arrived.

The original package, correctly addressed (Ireland and with an Air Mail sticker), arrived a week later (after the event) with an official stamp on the front stating "Not Iceland".

Did you use second class stamps( think that is what they are called ) on them? A friend of my husband in the UK always send Christmas cards that way and the ones to us have has some epic journeys before they get to us. Thailand seem to feature a lot.

Alun

I have to continually tell all my relatives in the UK that they can't just put on a generic 1st or 2nd class stamp to send stuff to me and have to put on the same postage as if they were sending it to another EU country.

My sister recently sent me a post card from Venice, and it was sent via a private postal system called GPS globepostalservice.com. I've no idea what route that took but it was a good few weeks after she had already got home that it arrived.

Nabber

My wife sends a lot of packages to Mauritius, if you don't finish off the address with "Indian Ocean" chances are the package will end up in Mauritania.just human error.

The Thing I don't get is posting cards through an online site.

SuperS54

mariaalice wrote: »

Did you use second class stamps( think that is what they are called ) on them? A friend of my husband in the UK always send Christmas cards that way and the ones to us have has some epic journeys before they get to us. Thailand seem to feature a lot.

Common here but a bit more understandable!

Thomas__

mariaalice wrote: »

Did you use second class stamps( think that is what they are called ) on them? A friend of my husband in the UK always send Christmas cards that way and the ones to us have has some epic journeys before they get to us. Thailand seem to feature  a lot.

No, they were first class stamps and that´s what they told me at the shop where I bought both the cards and the stamps. They were the same stamps (in value and classification) like those I purchased last year in Cambridge (and it didn´t take that long then). The rather new thing in England is, that one has to manage his post oneself and not go to the counter to have that handled by the post office staff, no matter whether it is domestic post or for abroad. The rate for a post card has become the same as for a letter to continental Europe.

SEPT 23 1989

It took less time to send a letter by mail from Dublin to London in the late 19th century than it takes today

gramar

The Royal Mail are outsourcing delivery to the Philippines. Much cheaper.

Badly Drunk Boy

I was just reading this thread, listening to my MP3 player on 'shuffle' when, half through a song, I realised it was about the postal service.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFJPYi3JXw4

ohnonotgmail

SEPT 23 1989 wrote: »

It took less time to send a letter by mail from Dublin to London in the late 19th century than it takes today

at that time somebody in dublin could send a letter to somebody else in dublin and receive a response on the same day.

Syphonax

My address has B in it somewere, when I was on a cruise a few years back in the Med I haad sent a postcard from Egypt to a friend, it arrived about 3 months after the cruise and had on it 'redirected from Bermuda' still to this day makes me laugh

diomed

my3cents wrote: »

Old story but wife was waiting for dated tickets from the UK that arrived just in time by courier after complaining that the originals hadn't arrived.

The original package, correctly addressed (Ireland and with an Air Mail sticker), arrived a week later (after the event) with an official stamp on the front stating "Not Iceland".

That happened to me years ago when I bought motorbike suspension springs from Germany. When they arrived late the package was stamped saying redirected from Iceland.
An island in the Atlantic, Ireland/Iceland, much the same to post office sorters on the continent.

Thomas__

ohnonotgmail wrote: »

SEPT 23 1989 wrote: »

It took less time to send a letter by mail from Dublin to London in the late 19th century than it takes today

at that time somebody in dublin could send a letter to somebody else in dublin and receive a response on the same day.

Times are changing fast.

ohnonotgmail

Thomas__ wrote: »

Times are changing fast.

well now they can just text each other

ScumLord

gramar wrote: »

The Royal Mail are outsourcing delivery to the Philippines. Much cheaper.

This is one of the things that annoys me about modern economics. It can't cost less resources to send mail to the Philippines and then back to Europe than it would to just send it to the other European country. It's a wasteful loophole created by the global economy.

Alun

Thomas__ wrote: »

No, they were first class stamps and that´s what they told me at the shop where I bought both the cards and the stamps.

UK 1st and 2nd class stamps are for domestic use only within the UK. To send a letter or postcard to Germany, or anywhere else in the world including Ireland from the UK you need a different stamp with an actual value on it rather than just 1st or 2nd.

Samaris

Occurs to me it's not a new problem (although apparently the Royal Mail used to be better!). Excuse the long quote following from Bill Bryson, but it's a good yarn. Excised bits where I could, but it's about the differences between the Royal Mail and the American postal system.

"But as nearly always with government services, it couldn't last. When I got home, the day's mail was on the mat. There amongst the usual copious invitations to acquire new credit cards, save a rainforest, become a life member of the National Incontinence Foundation, add my name (for a small fee) to the Who's Who of People Named Bill in New England, examine without obligation the Volume One of Great Explosions, help the National Rifle Association with its Arm-a-Toddler campaign and the scores of other unsought inducements, special offers and solicitations involving naff little adhesive rectangles with my name and address already printed on them - you really cannot believe the volume of junk mail that you receive in this country nowadays - well, amongst all this clutter and detritus was a forlorn and mangled letter that I had sent forty-one days earlier to a friend in California, care of his place of employment, and that was now being returned to me marked 'Insufficient Address - Get Real and Try Again" or words to that effect.

...

The problem with my letter was that I had addressed it to my friend merely 'c/o Black Oak Books, Berkeley, California' without a street name or number because I didn't know either. I appreciate that it is not a complete address but it's a lot more explicit than "HILL JOHN MASS" and anyway, Black Oak Books is a Berkeley instituion. Anyone who knows the city - and I assumed in my quaint, naive way that that would include the local postal authorities - would know Black Oak Books. But oh no. (Goodness knows, incidentally, what my letter had been doing in California for six weeks, but it came back with a nice tan and urge to get in touch with its inner feelings)

Now, just to give this plaintive tale a little heart-warming perspective, let me tell you that not long before I departed from England, the Royal Mail had brought me, within 48 hours of its posting in London, a letter addressed to "Bill Bryson, Writer, Yorkshire Dales", which is a pretty impressive bit of sleuthing. (And never mind that the correspondent was a trifle off his head)
..."

- From article in Mail on Sunday's Night & Day Magazine, somewhere around 1996/7.