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With Christmas Day being just three weeks away, shoppers are being urged to get their presents and cards in the post to make sure they arrive in time.
As families get ready to send millions of items through the post to loved ones at home and overseas, Post Office and its parcel arm Parcelforce are gearing up for their busiest time of year.
Depending on what you want to send and where you want to send it, you may have already missed Royal Mail’s cheapest services, some of which were way back in September for anywhere overseas.
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However, you’ve still got a little bit of time if you want to send to anywhere except the Caribbean, although you need to get your skates on if you have loved ones in Australia, Greece, Italy, New Zealand or Portugal, as the deadline for those countries is on Monday, December 6.
The countries with the latest posting date on Thursday, December 16 are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Spain and Switzerland.
All other countries fall between those two dates.
(Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
If you miss the Post Office’s last posting dates, Parcelforce generally offers much later deadlines – but you’ll pay handsomely for it.
For example, a 500g parcel sent to Australia via Royal Mail at the Post Office will cost £18.50 maximum, while the same weight parcel sent by Parcelforce on the latest possible posting date (16 December) by its GlobalExpress service will cost you an eye-watering £172.50.
If your sending your Christmas mail within the UK, life is a lot simpler.
The last posting date for 2nd Class mail is December 18 and 1st Class December 21, although posting earlier than those dates is recommended.
A full list of the dates to remember is available here.
If you fancy giving another delivery company a whirl instead of Royal Mail or Parcelforce, you might want to read this first.
Citizens Advice carried out a survey of popular parcel delivery firms, and all were found to have performance issues.
Hermes was bottom of the table and Amazon Logistics top, but Citizens Advice reported ‘huge cracks’ in the sector, with firms are failing on trust and leaving consumers out of pocket as a result.
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