The quality of letter mail service in Europe continues to far exceed the European Union’sofficial targets, an International Postal Corporation (IPC) survey showed.
Both the European Union’s speed objective of 85% of intra-EU mail delivery within three days ofposting, and its reliability objective of 97% within five days were clearly met last year,according to the annual IPC UNEX survey. This was the 14th consecutive year that the objectiveswere exceeded.
In 2011 93.0% of international priority and first-class letter mail was delivered within threedays of posting and 98.1% within five days. Average delivery time was 2.2 days. These results covera total of 35 countries: the 27 EU Member States together with Croatia, the Former YugoslavRepublic of Macedonia, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina, andSerbia, which joined last April.
Commenting on the results, Herbert-Michael Zapf, President and CEO, IPC, said: “2011 was the14th year in succession that the end-to-end performance for priority letter mail in Europe exceededboth the speed and reliability objectives, demonstrating the determination of the postal operatorsto maintain high quality services for customers.”
Quality of service performance is measured by IPC’s UNEX end-to-end monitoring system which isconducted independently by an external research firm. The results for 2011 were based on 336,000test letters containing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. The passage of a test letter ata specific point in the mail pipeline is recorded by RFID readers. The test letters moveanonymously through the international mail processing system, from posting to delivery.
