What's going on with Royal Mail lately?

[Retrograde]

I bought stuff for over 10 years from the UK, but it seems the service has become worse and worse, recent years it has been flaky.
Example, I bought 2 things this January:
1 item from Manchester on the 2nd of January, still not arrived and tracking gives nothing but an error.
1 item from a small place outside of Warsaw, Poland, arrived in 7 days.

What gives?

Annoying as hell!

 

[BrooksterMax]

It’s a bit slow at the moment always seems to be a backlog post Christmas that takes time to clear. Certainly I am seeing that right now.

 

[fitzsteve]

You know once the package leaves the UK it's no longer handled by Royal Mail and it's carried by whatever you local post service is? I believe the delays are by whom ever the middle man is in this case probably GLS?

 

[Retrograde]

You know once the package leaves the UK it's no longer handled by Royal Mail and it's carried by whatever you local post service is? I believe the delays are by whom ever the middle man is in this case probably GLS?

Yes of course.
Thing is though tracking generally seems to be working better in some other cases, but it depends on what deals and integration they have with other postal services.
I can't see that's it's arrived at my local country, not yet. Though our postal service has it's flaws you can generally get some tracking info.

 

[clint]

The Royal Fail has gone right down the pan of late, Christmas does not come in to it as an excuse, I have an ongoing complaint investigation lodged against them at the moment, re:- why did it take them seven days to deliver a recorded package when it was guarantied to be delivered in three days. There was also an order from a company that took nearly two weeks to be delivered, this was also sent on a three day guarantied status. As some else as said their tracking is useless.

 

[8 Bit Dreams]

seems not only Royal Mail, also PostNL is affected..
just checked additional info:

Heavy snow storms in Scotland and Norther England have disrupted traffic. Deliveries might experience minor delays. We will inform you when the situation will be back to normal.

The office of exchange at Auckland Airport has been evacuated due to a bio security issue on 14/01. The office is expected to reopen on 16/01 after the building has been decontaminated. Deliveries to New Zealand can experience delays throughout the upcoming week. We will inform you when the situation will be back to normal.
Update 17/01: Normal operations have resumed on Tuesday 16/01.

 

[fitzsteve]

You know once the package leaves the UK it's no longer handled by Royal Mail and it's carried by whatever you local post service is? I believe the delays are by whom ever the middle man is in this case probably GLS?

Yes of course.
Thing is though tracking generally seems to be working better in some other cases, but it depends on what deals and integration they have with other postal services.
I can't see that's it's arrived at my local country, not yet. Though our postal service has it's flaws you can generally get some tracking info.

The Airmail tracking system Royal Mail use is basic at best, you get little to no updates. If you want proper tracking better use a courier service like UPS/DPD/FedEx.

 

[slaz]

Yeah - RM is in a state. Well - it seems to be pot luck really.

Took 2.5 weeks recently for a letter from Slovenia to reach me here .... got a hunch it was in the UK for some time before it reached me.

I reckon RM is using all kind of dodgy practices and tricks to keep their costs down.

 

[fitzsteve]

I just received a second class parcel that was posted yesterday

 

[Retrograde]

Not sure what's going on right now, since RM isn't forthcoming with info, we'll see next week, but indeed a courier service can be better, depending. Had some odd issues with DHL a couple times business to business a few years ago.
Back in the day it took a steady 3-4 working days UK<->Sweden, with little variance, is my point.

 

[Harrison]

As some of you know one of my jobs is working for Royal Mail part time in a distribution centre. From my point of view we had no real issues in terms of how the business conducts itself. The only issue was an abnormally large amount of mail over Christmas. That statement might sound a bit silly considering the time of year, but year on year letter volumes have logically been falling, whereas parcel volumes thanks to online sales have been increasing. But for some reason this Christmas our letter volumes shot up to silly levels meaning we couldn't clear all the work arriving each evening. Normally all mail arriving is processed and shipped to delivery offices by 21:30 each night, whereas this meant only part went and the remainder was processed over night and either dispatched early morning or the following day. It was like the good old days.

I really can't comment on the tracked item issues mentioned here as I only deal with business mail and not general public mail. But Special Deliveries were all handled perfectly well from our office in the secure cage.

 

[Rasta]

I'm not going to swear, I'm going to say this politely.

Just cost me pennies short of £60 to send, more or less, 10 magazines and about 20 disks to Switzerland. W _ T _ F !

 

[Dagger]

If you had used Parcelforce through the Parcel2go website would of worked out a lot cheaper. I think about £24

 

[Retrograde]

As some of you know one of my jobs is working for Royal Mail part time in a distribution centre. From my point of view we had no real issues in terms of how the business conducts itself. The only issue was an abnormally large amount of mail over Christmas. That statement might sound a bit silly considering the time of year, but year on year letter volumes have logically been falling, whereas parcel volumes thanks to online sales have been increasing. But for some reason this Christmas our letter volumes shot up to silly levels meaning we couldn't clear all the work arriving each evening. Normally all mail arriving is processed and shipped to delivery offices by 21:30 each night, whereas this meant only part went and the remainder was processed over night and either dispatched early morning or the following day. It was like the good old days.

I really can't comment on the tracked item issues mentioned here as I only deal with business mail and not general public mail. But Special Deliveries were all handled perfectly well from our office in the secure cage.

Well, I am assuming there are local and regional distribution centers, there are a few factors at play here, so a bit hard for anyone to know what's going on with 1 specific item.
Unfortunately a couple years ago I had another problem where a much larger item was sent from the Luton area, took 3 months so essentially the item was lost for a while, and the packaging was a bit banged up. Asked the seller to send a replacement after a month, which did arrive in a week. Then we split return freight for the original item and all that, a bit of a nuiscance, all in all.

Though I'm just taking it in stride, this is not a bash on RM in general, things usually work out just fine.
Will just wait and see with my little MiniXUM.

 

[Rasta]

I'll have to check out parcel2go, thought the parcel had to go by ParcelForce.

If you had used Parcelforce through the Parcel2go website would of worked out a lot cheaper. I think about £24

 

[Dagger]

Yes it still goes by ParcelForce. Parcel2go.com is just a booking site for various courier companies - a go between. It works out a lot cheaper than buying the posatge direct from the courier company. I book my ParcelForce and UPS parcels through them, pay by Paypal - attach the printed off waybill and then just take straight to the P.O or UPS access point. You can get them to pick up from you as well if it is easier for you.

 

[Rasta]

Sorry, that was a typo. I didn't mean "thought" - I mean to say "though" - cos it went by ParcelForce.

 

[Harrison]

Yeah, Parcel2Go is definitely worth looking at. You can save a lot compared to booking directly. And direct collection is great for larger parcels. Although do still compare because a few times it has been cheaper for me to just go to the Post Office and send 1ST class recorded.

Sent from my SM-G950F using Tapatalk

 

[fitzsteve]

I don't send much these days but I had a couple of parcels to Europe, I've used DPD via Parcelmonkey which worked out very cheap and they give you text message updates as well.

 

[RuneRider]

I ordered a small item from the UK in November. Still waiting.