Three-quarters of mail delivered within a day this Christmas

Maltapost has achieved the best-ever next-day delivery during the Christmas period, the company said yesterday.

In December, Maltapost handled over 6.39 million items and on some peak days the number of items processed fell just short of half a million units.

Despite the much higher than average workload, Maltapost reported a best-ever next-day delivery over the Christmas period with about 75 per cent of all local mail being successfully delivered the day after. Given that mail traffic almost quadruples during certain periods in the month of December, the results demonstrate a considerable improvement over Maltapost's Christmas performance last year, when several people lamented that posted items were taking days to reach the addressee.

Joe Azzopardi, who heads Maltapost's quality assurance department, hailed the performance as the best since quality of service tests were introduced in March 2000, confirming that the reforms implemented last year were beginning to bear fruit.

Quality of service tests are carried out by Maltapost on a weekly basis and, in order to ensure more accuracy, the number of test letters mailed in December was doubled.

Groups of letters were mailed to areas within each of the five hubs in Malta and Gozo in order to ensure a clearer delivery pattern for each locality. The test letters are mailed from different areas and when received at Maltapost and analysed, give a clear indication of delivery service standards achieved on an ongoing basis.

Maltapost's chief executive officer Stephen Sultana said that the situation at Maltapost had improved considerably and the new processes put in place last year were clearly working as originally intended.