How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

We are typically seeing 3 weeks for mail from UK to Aus (Melbourne), and about a week for Aus to UK. Is that what you are noticing, or is it just us?:unsure:

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

Got three items yesterday, 2 letters and a small packet. The latter took 3 weeks, 1 letter took 3 weeks. The other took six weeks. In 14 years I've never known it this slow.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

The piece of string is 6 inches long!

Oops - no, seriously, I'm not sure there is a hard and fast time frame at the moment. We generally allow 3 weeks for parcels and it's been thereabouts for quite some time now, cards 7-10 days. We sent the granddaughter's birthday present (for Saturday) at just under the 3 weeks hoping it would arrive on time but it got there 8 days ago so just 10 days this time. I think it's actually in inverse proportion to the urgency of the parcel - there's probably a mind reading machine which determines if it's urgent and important in which case it goes on the slow boat but if it's trivial and non urgent it's sent express!

I think Aus - UK is quite quick at the mo, our son often sends stuff that takes mere days to arrive

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

Aus to UK seems about average at present 3-5 days.

The other way though, from the UK is truly dire. Like I said, I have never known it this bad. Over the years its been between 3 days and 2-3 weeks, but at present nothing seems to come through in under 3 weeks, even basic letters. Its been like this for about 2 months, driving ebay sellers up the wall.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

I've been in the UK for 2 years, my parcels and letters back to Perth take a minimum of 3 weeks. Delivery times for last year's Christmas cards were 4 to 8 weeks!

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

In the past I've had stuff sent UK to Aus and it's arrived in 4/5 days. The same going the other way. Recently things are taking over a month. It's mad. No idea if it's Royal Mail or Aus Post but it pisses me off.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

I've had several periods when mail UK-Brisbane and back again only takes 3 days each way, thats like heaven. Trouble is that it doesn't last!

Did you hear my best story? When I first came here I worked as a casual at Northgate Sorting Office for Aus Post. Lots of automated sorting, and the machines have vertical conveyor belts to move the letters, the mail stays on them because of the speed they move. If the belts stop, the mail falls off - either into the right bin (by chance) the wrong bin, or just onto the floor. The priority, I was told,was to just get the belt going again, no time to retrieve mail, it would just stay where it had fallen. And the floor was well covered with envelopes. On Christmas Eve there was a catastrophic failure, we were told an engineer had to come out and it would mean hours offline. So they opened the doors and told us to retrieve the fallen mail.
One envelope was mine!!:blink::ohmy: It was the last card I sent to my then fiance to say I had finally moved out of my flat, prior to emigrating. Posted on October 16th.
The only comment by our supervisor was - by glad its not in that one over there, that hasn't broken down for SIX YEARS.

Never trusted Aus Post since then, total lack of respect for any mail in their system, and total lack of care for the public who deal with them.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

Feedback from fellow ebay sellers seems to indicate its largely the Aus Post end - things can get here in a few days but then take weeks to go round Australia. Similar to postage within Aus, selling something to WA from brisbane regularly takes 3-4 weeks and at present even the Gold Coast is 2-3 weeks to deliver. Thats letter-sized stuff, parcels can be even longer.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

Australia Post are in a position to make a fortune with Ebay and Online shopping in General, but instead of offering a great service they are driving customers away. A bit like our local Fish and Chip shop that closes at 5pm.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

Pretty sure it is either Auspost or customs causing the delay.
My son ordered something from the UK and my husband something from Melbourne on the same afternoon. We are in Adelaide.
Sons parcel arrived by private courier in three days. Hubbies over two weeks after dispatch notice which in itself was three days after order.

Reacting to my surprise on receiving sons parcel so soon delivery man said. " well this isn't by Auspost!"

Wait till amazon gets here, bet they won't be using Auspost unless it gets better.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

Yep, if you happen to have tracking you can see when it leaves the UK. That's usually in the 3 day type timeframe. Then it hits customs / auspost and it both disappears, and slows to a crawl.

It'll never get better until it starts costs those two for their failure. Problem is, once they start trying to charge GST on all imports, it'll get worse.

Ozzie suggest he thinks auspost have the amazon contract. I hope to hell he's wrong - because they are useless enough as it is.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

So Auspost is the bottleneck? Wife got so fed-up with her latest birthday cards arriving late she has complained to RM. Looking forward to seeing what they say.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

Actually I'd guess it's the customs lot. Sure auspost don't help, but customs, and particularly sydney customs, seems to be the common element. Couriers pay for faster customs clearance, which is why they can get parcels through in hours. Auspost things just get thrown in a queue, which one of these muppets might eventually get round to.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

My guess is Australia Post, or something on the Australian side. I'm in NZ now and in the last few months have had quite a lot of mail sent from the UK - it arrives in less than a week, in some cases a couple of days. (Ordered Tue evening and arrived on Fri)

When I lived in Australia it seem to take weeks, even mail from NZ took a couple of weeks.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

Just as bad here! Philpost is rubbish. Mail from UK gets to Manila within 4/5 days then can take weeks to travel the last 400 miles to Cebu , ( maybe not at all if it looks like it may contain something of value!) then will sit in the PO until you go get it. No indication anythings arrived unless you have an "agreement" with the post master to text you! We have 2 posties for 300,000 people in our town so really only business mail gets delivered. We are lucky in that one of our subdivision guards visit the PO daily and then distributes any mail to the appropriate house. To UK can take from 10 days to weeks. anything valuable or important we always send by courier which takes 4/5 days but does at least get there!The utility companies physically deliver the bills to your property otherwise they would never get paid due to "I never got a bill" syndrome. My bank also delivers statements by hand!

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

It's customs ;)

As for the stuff that takes a couple of weeks, without being patronising, make sure your post code is very very clear. If the machine misreads it, it will go on a 6000K journey in some cases.

Post Codes take precedence over everything else you put on your envelope. So you could have Bank of Melbourne Head office, Collins St, Melbourne 3000, if that post code gets misread as a 6000 despite the obvious address, it will go to Perth.

We see dozens of these everyday, just a little quirky curl on the first digit of the post code stuffs a lot of deliveries.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

:sneaky: And when simple envelopes, clearly and correctly addressed takes over a month to travel from Northampton UK to Gold Coast Aus? No one will shoot or arrest you if you admit that Aus Post are crap. :D

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

To be honest problem I have with this is I've never seen it myself. I only see 10 day old post codes at the most. I do random observations for my own benefit frequently.

Not sure how this can be possible given the feedback.

Did that particular letter have a sea mail sticker, or was minus a airmail sticker. 4 weeks being the surface mail time generally ? It feels to me without being able to decipher the barcodes that it's come surface mail for some reason.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

I'm not talking about A letter. I'm talking abut 3-4 packets and at least two letter/cards per fortnight, All clearly addressed with postcodes as I was taught as a kid :lol:
They all turn up eventually, air mail stickers and all, but the time delay is constant and is horrific.

Had one from Lloyds a couple of weeks back, it took 6 weeks from the UK. I Had to send a paper reply :ohmy: but that only took three days to get back to the UK as they emailed me a thank you when they got it!

Its as bad domestic as well - along with several other ebayers in Brisbane we warn west coast buyers that they need to allow 3-4 weeks for envelopes to arrive. Not parcels, just postcard sized envelopes. Maybe those are going by seamail too.......:lol:;)

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

I've got no idea where they could be going then, believe it or not Aus Post does not store mail. They turn around everything they get in their mail centres within 24 hours, the rest has to be in transit somewhere. IE: processed within 24 hours and transit for the rest of the time. It has to be customs with the international mail at least.

Can you imagine the mountain of mail there would be if they stored it for 4 weeks?

There seems to be one hell of a gap from what I see and what others are seeing. I do know one thing, they definitely do not store it at Mail centres anywhere around the country..... Parcel centres admittedly could be a different story... I'm not so sure on those. Mail 100 pct is cleared through the mail centres in 24 hours. Whether it gets cleared correctly or not could be an issue.... Doubt it to that extent though.



I reckon it's worth sending a private tracker through the post from Brisbane now. If that mail had one of the hidden electronic KPMG trackers that we get dozens of every day, then mysteriously it would turn up on time, as do all the KPMG trackers we normally get reports on (well 98.5 pct are the official figures from KPMG) . Hence a private tracker could really be a good idea.


KPMG send out 100's of electronically tracked items through Aus Post nationwide every day and do random audits on top

https://home.kpmg.com/au/en/home/about.html

I'm now wondering what the hell is going on, how can KPMG's electronics and what I see be so different to what I read on here. Every Transport hub, every Mail Centre, every parcel center has electronic RFID's fitted at entry and exit points just to track this KPMG stuff . Those 1.5 pct that are missed have to be explained, it happens to us now and again, "What happened to this particular item, why did it get delayed?, explain why it missed the pick up/interchange at YOUR facility" If you saw how seriously they take these things you'd be amazed. Especially in light of the feedback on here.


Send a private tracker someone please !!!






Plus where is this mail, it can't all be on the road, it's definitely not in the mail centres.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

Looks like wife's card from her dad has arrived, at last!

Birthday is 19th, stamped 12th (do you get more optimistic as you get older?). There's another time code on it: DLC996-1, 07:56, 04/09/2017 - Australian?

Anyway, took just over 3 weeks from Bradford to Melbourne.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

Exactly what I wanted.... That DLC996 is when it finally hit Dandenong Letter Center Flat bed Machine 996-1, which was at 7.56am on the 4/09/2017.... before then it was en route to Dandenong. Which means it has been in Customs hands for around 3 weeks before it got to Aus Post. So after first process by Aus Post it's got to you in one day.


Those black and/or orange or yellow bar tagged with black printed codes are the key to finding out where this mail has been or which route it takes. All letters have them or should have them now.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

If I were a cynic (if) then I'd guess that the customs lot were looking to create a two tier service. Those companies that pay up to the GST extortion racket get swift parcel clearance. Those that don't get stuck in a big pile with Bert sending out threatening letters to the individuals that ordered, demanding money or you'll never see your property again.

The pathetic speed slowdown seems to be coincident with when the GST on imports rort was supposed to be implemented originally.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

How long does customs take to check a birthday card?

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

On the floor inside the machines ....(see Post 7 above!).

Had to laugh today - got a letter from HM Tax Office, dated 16th July.......marked please reply within 14 days. Oh how we laughed :lol::lol:

Unfortunately no tracking number etc on it.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

:eek: :blink::blink:

There's a thread on automation somewhere. Its supposed to be a job killer.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

No excuse for that at all, I'd be amazed if similar doesn't happen with all mail services though. Aus Post bought those machines from overseas so they will be in use in other countries.

Comes under that 1.5 pct failure, Plus I guarantee, for every one of those letters in that machine there would 1,000 plus letters with no addresses on them or totally undeliverable addresses. All of which the mail sender will blame their local mail service for not delivering.

We see most of those bad addresses, as we end up with the hand sorted 3 pct of letters that cannot be machine sorted. That's the main part of my job. Non Machinable mail. We get 100's of badly addressed letters per day. Some only have names on them, no streets, no numbers, wrong countries, or just Preston Australia.... There are 5 Prestons in Australia. We even get them for the Preston in the UK on a daily basis, sent from the Royal Mail themselves.

Fulwood Preston causes real issues. We get lots of those at least 10 a week. I can only assume there is a Fulwood in Preston Lancashire as well as here.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

The last few I've had from the UK don't even have a UK frank on them, let alone an Aus track. :lol: I was going to remove the stamps until I realised I wouldn't be able to use them. :)

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

Got my figures and paperwork, just waiting for the final form to sign, 70 of us night sorters going out of 230 in Melbourne. Uptil they implemented this final stage we all were told there would be no more night shift at all and were either going to take voluntary redundancies or be relocated to other positions within post.... Drivers, Posties (walking) or in the Parcels division......This final stage has been 3 years in the planning and implementation..... they've re thought that no night shift position.

It's the nonmachinable mail that's keeping us in a job..... Missorts mostly.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

There should be a barcode on it, it's how it gets through the machine.

Some of them are really faint, like a very light pink or orange colour. Once that barcode is stamped on it by a machine that's where that letter goes, regardless of the address until it reaches the Postie who handsorts the final part on his round..... Thats going to come bundled within the next 3 years, so there will be even more missorts I reckon. The only chance the Postie will have to see that is as he is putting into the letter box and if it's in the middle of 3 letters no chance.

Not to mention that Austria has "3000" post codes as well as does New Zealand so we get plenty of their mail as well.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

Yeah, no nothing. They've been as clean as they were when they left the sender's hand. One from Northants, one from Herts. We even all looked at them closely because it just seemed odd.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

Maybe there were a lot of those letters for different addresses in Australia and it's come in a barcoded tub, initiated at the sending point to one particular address and once there it's been realised as a missort or multi addresses. Must have been hand sorted once it hit Australia, which would go some way to explaining the delay and the lack of bar codes.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

Evolution .... consider those a promotion.

Be thankful you weren't a fax machine. You would have evolved into something weird like email or a scanner.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

Bugger that, I started at Post as a driver, with the end result of an aversion to city driving. Hence my love affair with public transport.

A walking round would be good though.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mai
 

Another tale from my sorting days...... some Eastern European countries, I forget which ones, have 4 digit postcodes.
We came across several letters where people had written the four digits in the boxes on the envelope, thus the machine had sorted them to go to Sydney. When we pointed this out one of the full-time guys said, yeah happens all the time, we just go by the postcode. You must ignore the address.
Sydney of course did the same and the letters just went back and forth :blink: Apparently even if the staff see the word ROMANIA or whatever in large print they are allowed to ignore it!

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

You could become one of those contractors. You know, the ones I catch filling out the "you weren't at home" form before they reach the front door.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

There is mate. Presumably, someone posting a domestic letter in the UK wouldn't put country on the item, but it should have a UK postcode.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

Hey Ozzie, can you tell me if there is any truth in this one -one of the Northgate sorters told me the best way to ensure manual sorting, and thus increase the chances of an item going to the right place, fast, is to use a red, orange or gold/silver shiny, envelope.
He reckoned the machines can't read them properly and so spit them out for manual sort.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mai
 

Yes that is the bain of my life, still happens now and that 'tude is nationwide.



The thing is occasionally you will see another country written on a letter that has the correct Australian postcode, that is rare of course but it does happen. The only way to stop this happening is to cross out the post code and altering letters is a bigger crime than misrouting them. I break the fundamental rule and cross out the post code. No one has ever been "Coded" for crossing out a post code, but neither has anyone been coded for following whats written on the letter and they are the official rules.



Bottom line first is the sorters mantra.

Re: How long for UK to Aus mail?
 

True :) Although this new machine has the capacity to read lots of colours. Black envelope with white writing is the way to go.