In a week or so I intend to send Joy a whole lot of paperwork as evidence for our visa application and I was wondering which service to use. Parcelforce? Cheaper perhaps, but is it as reliable as DHL or UPS? I will be sending my parcel to Manila, Paranaque to be precise.. And it will be a folder/binder with very important paperwork I could do without the liklihood of delay or loss. Any suggestions?
Well I suppose I would have recommended DHL just on UK reputation and having received lots of stuff delivered by them but I recently read some community articles on eBay Philippines where the local operators for DHL are accused of being extortionists who are hand in hand with customs and where anything no matter what the value can be held by DHL and extortionate fees automatically charged for storage. I believe DHL and customs open just about everything for inspection, obviously they then decide if they can legitimately charge duty (which would clearly not be the case with documents) and use that as an excuse to charge inflated duty and storage and a host of other fees. The last head of customs apparently worked for the DHL operators at some point in the past or now works for them. However the conundrum is what to use instead, Parcel Force will I think go through the ordinary postal system in the Phils once it gets there and they don't have a great reputation for reliability either, not so much corruption but just incompetence. UPS got slightly better comments on the eBay articles but clearly most people have problems because they are shipping of articles with monetary value and in your case that is not strictly the case. So I'm sorry Sean I don't really know LBC was good in the other direction Manila->Scotland but they don't have a presence here in the UK.
DHL Kuya We had an unpleasant experience with UPS I should've applied for visa last year. My bf used UPS (I recommended it to him) to send me the docs and he did without knowing that the docs got stuck somewhere for almost a month so in the end, I didn't get it. UPS returned the money he paid for the services and ++ for the trouble it caused him. He used DHL the second time and we are very satisfied with the services
Plenty of folks I know use Interparcel They actually use well known organisation like DHL or Fedex etc but tend to be significantly cheaper than going direct. You could also look at Transglobal and Worldwide Parcel services Over the past few years when sending only documents (especially for various visa's) I've personally always used DHL and never had a single issue. The other advantage for me is that we are very close to 2 DHL service centres. One at our local WH Smith and another at our local Staples. Both places very helpful and surprisingly knowledgeable. I often chosen to go with DHL directly rather than with an sub-agent such as Interparcel simply because you need to work with Interparcel in the case of any problems. Always worth a bit extra to deal direct with DHL I figure. Parcelforce just don't cut it in my view. I've listened to too many horror stories.
