disappointedNearly two weeks ago I moved back into private halls in my university city, and inevitably I managed to forget something when packing the car and so I asked my parents to send it to me in the post.
My mother sends the parcel on the 13th by Royal Mail's next day by 1pm service costing a little under £9 in total, and so the following afternoon I go down to the reception desk in my building hoping my parcel will be there to collect, but it isn't. The receptionists check their office, but there's no sign of the parcel. I contact my mother, and when she checks the tracking code it shows the item was delivered at 9am that morning. Reception told me to come back again the next day, since the delivery worker was a different one to usual and maybe something went wrong.
I go back the next day and of course it hasn’t turned up. I get the tracking code from my mother, ring up Royal Mail's helpline and speak to one of their helpline staff. He tells me that he can track the point at which the parcel was signed for by GPS, so he looks it up for me and tells me that it was definitely delivered to my building at 9am on the 14th. He also gives me the name of the person who signed for it, and so back down to reception I go. They tell me that the mail didn’t arrive until 11am on the 14th, and even more puzzlingly that the name of the person who signed for it was a receptionist at one of their other properties in the same city. They ring up the other property and speak to the receptionist in question, but she doesn’t know anything about it, and my parcel isn’t at their building either. So then the receptionist at my building rings up Royal Mail to clarify things, and eventually passes the phone over to me again. This time I get a different person, and she tells me that the parcel was delivered to the wrong place because the sender hadn’t used the correct address. She wouldn’t tell me where it had been sent to, and said that the sender should ring them up instead.
So I called my mother, who insisted that she had used the address I sent her (and checking my email confirmed that I had sent the correct address). She then calls Royal Mail, and it turns out they have no idea where the parcel was sent to, and tell her that they’ll contact the distribution centre in my city in order to track down the delivery worker and find out from him.
Last Friday they called back, and went back to claiming it was sent to my building, and gave a different name for the signature. It turns out that there’s someone with this name working in my building, but that he wasn’t in until after 9.30 on the 14th and hasn’t signed for any parcels recently. Additionally, his signature is nothing like the one in the image provided by Royal Mail (which still looks more like the name they originally gave).
So my mother calls Royal Mail again, who promise to contact the distribution centre yet again. When she next hears from Royal Mail a week later (today) they once again claim it was definitely delivered to my halls and pass off the blame onto the receptionists at my building. They're sending a claim form, but since they have the GPS data to 'prove' it was signed for and delivered the chances of us getting compensation for the parcel seem pretty small, and I now have to spend £40 replacing the contents of the parcel.
TL;DR: Royal Mail special delivery parcel never arrives, appears to be fraudulently signed for. Royal Mail can't keep their story straight and dodge responsibility at every chance.