The Hague, the Netherlands, 20 December 2021 - PostNL is pulling out all the stops to deliver all mail and parcels on time in the hectic next few weeks. The busy peak season invariably involves additional measures being taken. And last Saturday, the Netherlands government announced a strict lockdown, requiring non-essential shops to close until at least mid-January. The additional measures PostNL already has taken for peak season will be extended to absorb the extra pressure.
PostNL has been busy upscaling its parcel delivery capabilities significantly since mid-November, in the run-up to Black Friday and the Saint Nicholas Day celebrations. On a regular day, PostNL delivers some 1.1 million parcels, but the peak season can see daily numbers surge to 2 million. The country’s fresh lockdown has prompted PostNL to extend its peak season measures until at least 14 January 2022, with its sorting centres running 24/7 every day of the week and some 1,500 extra parcel deliverers hitting the streets every day.
Liesbeth Kaashoek, PostNL’s Director of Parcels & Logistics, comments: "The lockdown in December 2020 taught us how important it is for businesses and consumers to stay in touch, and our deliverers, drivers, sorters and all other colleagues help us to facilitate this and serve as the connecting link. Once again, we’ll get out there to ensure that the rest of the country can stay at home. We’re doing everything within our power to keep doing our jobs in a healthy, safe and efficient way."
On any typical day, PostNL’s around 19,000 postal delivery people deliver over 8 million letters on average, with numbers rising to around 12 million a day in the run-up to the holidays. PostNL has taken a variety of measures to prepare for this seasonal peak, including extra scheduled delivery days on Mondays 20 and 27 December and more frequent post box collection times.
One thing PostNL is currently working on is to get in more people to help deliver mail and parcels over the next few weeks. It is investigating the option of offering work to people who are temporarily out of work because of this latest lockdown, as it did in the December 2020. As well as deliverers, this also involves drivers and sorting centre workers.
Being extremely busy, PostNL may come very close to maximum network capacity on certain days going forward, and it may occasionally take longer for parcels to be delivered than usual. This will really depend on how much more people order online with non-essential shops closed until at least mid-January – PostNL is and will remain in close contact with webstores about the state of play. At this point, it is unclear what the impact of the Omicron variant will be on employee absence through illness, but the health of employees at its sorting centres and other locations will of course come first. In other words, everyone should be able to continue to do their jobs safely.