And they are off…!
We sent packages to:
- Ouagadougou, the capital city of Burkina Faso in west Africa (formerly Upper Volta)
- Split, home of the Palace of Diocletian and the largest city in the Dalmatian region of Croatia
- Surabaya, capital of East Java, Indonesia
- Punta Arenas, capital of the Patagonian region of Chile and one of the southernmost cities in the world
The contestants
The start: Friday 14 April
We began by going to the web sites of each carrier to get the essential forms, such as for the commercial invoice required for international shipments. These were easy to find at at the UPS and DHL web sites, harder to find at Fedex. If we had been registered users of any of the services, we could have filled out all the required paperwork on the web; but we are not and so we looked for forms that we could print at our office. The forms were available only in pdf format. They seemed designed for printing and then filling in by hand; to edit them electronically requires Adobe Acrobat, which is proprietary software.
| Destination | Carrier | Cost | Delivery | Route | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ouagadougou | FedEx | $202.82 | 19 April 1709h | Atlanta; Memphis; Newark, NJ; Paris; Ouagadougou (details) |
WINNER! |
| UPS | $202.47 | 20 April 0919h | Atlanta; Hapeville, GA; Louisville, KY; Philadelphia; Paris; Abidjan; Ouagadougou (details) |
This package was delayed in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. The tracking message read: “The scheduled flight was cancelled and caused this delay due to circumstances beyond UPS control”. Strangely, this package was reported as having been scanned again at Abidjan on 21 April, a day after delivery! We are not sure what this means. |
|
| DHL | $165.02 | 28 April 1651h | Atlanta; Wilmington, OH; New York; Cologne; Brussels; Lagos; Ouagadougou (details) |
Our package sat in Ouagadougou for one week before delivery. DHL said the address was inadequate. |
|
| Punta Arenas | DHL | $124.93 | 18 April 1626h | Atlanta; Miami; Santiago; Punta Arenas (details) |
WINNER! |
| FedEx | $170.57 | 20 April 1141h, as reported to tracking, but recipient says it was actually delivered 19 April at 1730h |
Atlanta; Memphis; Miami; Santiago; Punta Arenas (details) |
||
| UPS | $167.67 | 20 April 1050h but recipient says 1115h | Atlanta; Hapeville, GA; Louisville, KY; Miami; Santiago; Punta Arenas (details) |
Tracking message on 18 April: “A processing error has at destination caused this delay [in Santiago]; the package was missorted at the hub. It has been rerouted to the correct destination site.” A message later that day says “The address is in a remote area and deliveries are not made daily.” Our recipient noted that the package was carried from Santiago to Punta Arenas by LANCargo and delivered locally by ChileExpress |
|
| Split | UPS | $224.16 | 19 April 1000h | Atlanta; Hapeville, GA; Louisville, KY; Cologne; Zagreb (details) |
WINNER!: ahead of DHL by only 3 minutes! (The recipient was not home to receive the package but we consider the race over when the package reaches its destination, even if the recipient is not there to receive it.) UPS returned the next day to deliver. |
| DHL | $157.68 | 19 April 1003h | Atlanta; Wilmington, OH; New York; Cologne; Brussels; Bergamo; Zagreb; … (details) |
No one was home at this, the first delivery attempt. | |
| FedEx | $222.82 | 24 April 0905h | Atlanta; Memphis; Panama City, Panama; Alajuela, Costa Rica???; Memphis, Paris; Frankfurt; Split (details) |
A keying error by courier: “CR” apparently sent our package to Costa Rica instead of CRoatia |
|
| Surabaya | UPS | $111.94 | 18 April 1205h | Atlanta; Hapeville, GA; Louisville, KY; Anchorage, AK; Incheon, Korea; Singapore; Jakarta; Surabaya (details) |
WINNER! |
| DHL | $76.15 | 19 April 0955h | Atlanta; Wilmington, OH; Singapore; Jakarta; Surabaya (details) |
||
| FedEx | $116.01 | 20 April 0913h | Atlanta; Indianapolis; Chicago; Anchorage; Subic Bay, Philippines; Cengkareng, Jakarta; Surabaya (details) |
The routes
Figure 1: UPS routes to our destinations
After local pickup, each package was driven to a local freight terminal, sorted, and then flown to one of the major sortation facilities the carriers operate in the midwestern US: UPS uses Louisville, KY; FedEx uses Indianapolis, IN or Memphis, TN; DHL uses Wilmington, OH (northeast of Cincinnati).
What we learned
- Our choice of destinations was not representative of most international shipping and may not reflect service to be expected to more typical destinations.
- For destinations, like ours, that are outside the larger channels of international commerce, packages are eventually transferred to local carriers who are subcontractred to the multinationals. Then we lost some visibility into the delivery chain. For example, the delivery times reported by DHL and UPS at Punta Arenas were inconsistent with those reported by our recipient.
- A surprising number of processing errors, especially keying errors, delayed packages: See, for example, UPS in Santiago; FedEx
in Costa Rica; and the puzzling UPS post-delivery scan in Abidjan. We experienced similar problems in 2004. - DHL was significantly less expensive than the others, yet won one race and missed winning another by only 3 minutes. But they let our package sit for a week in Ouagadougou. They claimed the address was inadequate but never explained how. Eventually they delivered the package.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Paul Goldsman, Sergio Maturana, and Sriram Subramanian for help in sending off the packages; and thanks to the recipients for documenting their arrival! Also thanks to Bob Foley for catching some errors in the original html coding for this web page and to Anton Kleywegt for correcting some of my lapses in the geography of Africa.
(My colleague George Nemhauser has visited two of these cities, Split and Punta Arenas. Has anyone else visited more than two?)