The uselessness of NZPost

The postal company here is called NZPost, and they are the most useless outfit I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. As regular readers will know, we are in the process of buying a house, and as part of that we need to transfer money from the UK for the deposit. This entails writing a letter to our bank in the UK to authorise the transfer.

On Tuesday 29th July, Skry took our letter to the local branch of NZPost and sent it using their fastest, premium delivery service - international express courier - which cost us a premium delivery charge of $42.50. According to NZPost, this is "a premium courier service for urgent documents and valuable parcels that require targeted delivery to main cities in major worldwide destinations in 1 – 5 working days".

On Saturday 2nd August, the fifth day after posting, our letter finally left New Zealand. Excuse my language, but how the hell is that an express service? Here is the current tracking status, which shows the letter finally leaving Auckland yesterday:

Five days to get a letter out of the country is neither a premium service nor an express one. First class mail would be faster than that - it's absolutely ridiculous.

Quite apart from this issue, I also have another huge problem with NZPost. The postal system here is a bit different from the UK and Ireland, in that people don't have letterboxes in their front doors - they have mailboxes at the roadside. These mailboxes aren't generally secured in any way, but since we are currently living beside a main road and our mailbox is the closest to the road of all the houses in this housing block, our mailbox is particularly insecure. When we moved in, I contacted NZPost to find out whether our mail would actually be safe or not. This is what they said:

Dear Jenny,

Thank you for your inquiry regarding Mail delivery.

Small Packages less than 1.5kg in weight are delivered by a postie. If the postie feels that it is unsafe to deliver this, they will leave a notification card/Card to Call. Any parcels over this weight, are delivered by Courierpost. The courier again, will try and deliver the item; however, if they do not have a safe place to leave the parcel, they too will leave a notification card/Card to Call.

An item that requires a signature is automatically carded/Card to Call, if there is no one available to sign for the item.

I trust this clarifies your concerns.

Thank you for contacting New Zealand Post Online Customer Service Centre.

Kind Regards,


Felila Fagalilo
New Zealand Post Customer Service

About a month ago, I received delivery of a long-awaited delivery of some quite expensive perfume, ordered online from the USA. Well, I received the package, but not the contents. This is what it looked like:


Not only had the package been left in a puddle, but it had been left in our mailbox in full view of all passing foot traffic along the main road - during the school holidays, I might add. I'm really not surprised that the perfume was stolen, only that the packaging was left for some reason.

When I contacted NZPost to let them know that their postie had left a clearly marked and clearly valuable delivery in an unsafe location, their response (after about two weeks) was that perfume is not meant to be sent in the post, and so I was not entitled to any compensation. If perfume isn't meant to be sent in the post, why did they accept it at the border when it arrived from the USA?? I don't see how that has the slightest bearing on the problem of their incompetence. I am still pursuing this issue, as they should be held liable for their postie's actions, but I was just flabbergasted that they even used such a flimsy excuse.

If I ever have a choice about using NZPost or some other company in future, for anything that is the slightest bit important to me, you can be sure I'll be using the other company. I advise everyone else to do the same!