The quality of letter mail service in Europe has continued to exceed both the European Union’s (EU) 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 2015 exceeded these objectives for the 18th consecutive year. In 2015, 89% of international priority and first class letter mail was delivered within three days of posting and 97.1% within five days. Average delivery time was 2.5 days. These results cover a total of 32 countries: the 28 EU Member States together with Iceland, Norway and Switzerland, as well as Serbia, which joined the measurement again in 2015.
Herbert-Michael Zapf, president and CEO, IPC, said, “Last year was the 18th 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. The consistent high level of performance demonstrates that postal operators continue to work hard to maintain a reliable service 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 2015 were based on 266,000 test letters of which more than 75% contained radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. The test letters move anonymously through the international mail processing system, from posting to delivery.
March 14, 2016
