Postal service quality in Europe exceeds EU objectives

Quality of letter mail service in Europe continues to far exceed both the European Union’s speed objective of 85% of intra-EU mail delivery within three days of posting, and its reliability objective of 97% within five days. Performance recorded by the IPC UNEX measurement system in 2013 exceeded these objectives for the 16th consecutive year.

In 2013 92.5% of international priority and first-class letter mail was delivered within three days of posting and 98.2% within five days. Average delivery time was 2.2 days. These results cover a total of 31 countries: the 28 EU Member States together with Iceland, Norway and Switzerland.

Commenting on the results, Herbert-Michael Zapf, President and Chief Executive officer, IPC, said: “2013 was the 16th consecutive year that the end-to-end performance for priority letter mail in Europe exceeded both the speed and reliability objectives set by the 1997 Postal Directive. This consistent high level of performance demonstrates that postal operators’ work very hard to maintain the same reliable high quality services for customers.”

Quality of service performance is measured by IPC’s UNEX end-to-end monitoring system which is conducted independently by external research firms. The results for 2013 were based on ca 200,000 test letters of which 80% was containing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. The passage of a test letter at a specific point in the mail pipeline is recorded by RFID readers. The test letters move anonymously through the international mail processing system, from posting to delivery.