DUBAI // A brown paper package containing what might be a new jumper lacks one thing on its hand-written label: a post office box number.
The package, like thousands of others on the first floor of the Emirates Post sorting centre in Deira, will never be delivered to its intended recipient in Dubai.
Instead, it will probably be returned to sender, or the Nottingham-based post office from which it was sent.
Jeremy Skyrme, executive director of sales at Emirates Post, says incorrect or incomplete addresses account for 90 per cent of the reasons why items are not delivered.
“The population of the UAE is growing at an exponential rate and new people are arriving every day,” said Mr Skyrme.
“Those new people need to be aware of how the postal system works here and make sure to tell their relatives to include correct PO box information on the packages they send.”
A straw poll conducted by The National two weeks ago found 66 per cent of those questioned had doubts over the reliability of Emirates Post.
In response, the postal authority invited reporters this week for a closer look at its sorting centre to help shine some light on why there are delays to deliveries and why certain items do not arrive.
The building in Umm Ramool receives about 20 million letters and parcels a month, about 5 million of which are international deliveries.
Only about 1 per cent of those items are returned to the sending country because of mislabelling, Mr Skryme said.
“We could go to the effort of tracking this person down at the company that is listed on the label, calling them up and telling them they’ve got a package waiting but we don’t know the PO box,” he said.
“But realistically, we don’t have the staff to do that, with the sheer volume of post that we have.
“A number of operators like DHL charge US$25 [Dh91] for an address change. If we provided that service for a charge, are we guaranteed that the person will actually pay?”
The postal operator also receives oddities – mail that is clearly intended for countries such as Oman, Saudi Arabia, or even Hong Kong, but somehow finds its way into a post bag heading to Dubai.
“In cases like that we send the mail back to the origin country with a note explaining that it was delivered to the wrong country,” said Abdullah Juma, senior director of exchange centres at Emirates Post.
“Sometimes they send it straight back to us. We’ve had a few cases recently where we’ve sent things back to the origin country around three times already, and they still keep sending it back.”
For people who have lost items in the post, it could be that it is sitting in an Emirates Post sorting centre somewhere as remote as the Comoros Islands after a mail operator in the origin country simply put it in the wrong dispatch box, said Mr Skyrme.
In The National's survey, 24 per cent of respondents said they had experienced items delayed for longer than three months.
But the postal company showed packages that arrived that very morning with wildly different despatch dates. Some were sent on April 4, and others on April 16.
Mr Skyrme said the problem lay in the origin country, with operators often waiting until items destined for Dubai fill bags to a certain weight before putting them on a plane.
“It doesn’t make economical sense for them to send just one or two packages, so they wait until they have enough post to send,” he said.
“Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do about that here. We receive the packages this morning, and we process them within 24 hours.”