Emirates Post to offer home delivery by 2012

Emirates Post expects to offer a complete home delivery service by 2012 that will pinpoint residential post boxes with a global positioning system.

Emirates Post expects to offer a complete home delivery service by 2012 that will pinpoint residential post boxes with a global positioning system.

Letterboxes will be built in apartments, offices and shelters near residences, with the location of each box built onto a digital map to aid postal workers.

Mana al Suwaidi, marketing director of Emirates Post, said a major project was under way to perfect the addressing system so that people could have mail delivered to their doorsteps.

“We are going to open more offices, and install more PO boxes,” he added.

The postal company recently purchased two mail-sorting machines for its Ramoul centre, at which an average of 72,000 letters are sorted per hour. Both are equipped with 360 stackers, so mail can be distributed directly to a local branch within 24 hours.

It also opened its 100th office in February, 100 years after the first post office was built in what is now the UAE.

Next year Emirates Post will roll out a service called e-PO Box, where people will be able to pay utility bills and traffic fines online. Customers will also be able to receive notifications through the service telling them of the arrival of registered mail.

The new GPS system will eliminate the confusion of trying to find a location by street name and building number, a major hurdle to a door-to-door delivery service.

At present, people trying to find a building often rely on landmarks and major roads.

While every building in Abu Dhabi city is numbered and sectored, the green street signs that give a sector, zone number and street number are not commonly used, and building numbers are not prominently displayed.

Because of these difficulties, delivering mail to residents’ doorsteps had been “a dream which we are working to make true”, said Mr al Suwaidi, a member of a committee that worked on the project.

While authorities in Ras al Khaimah, Dubai and Abu Dhabi are in various stages of implementing street name and numbering projects, those would have no bearing on Emirates Post’s plans, al Suwaidi said.

“An important aspect of the project itself is to go and physically mount PO boxes,” he said. “So we need to co-ordinate co-ordinateords, with property developers and designers to make sure they will accommodate certain areas for PO boxes to be installed.”