Postal services in Italy - Poste Italiane vs. Friendpost vs. GPSIs Canadian Visa Expert a legitimate company or a scam?Free wifi situation in ItalyGeneral Visit visa enquire for ItalyIs it normal for menus to be priced in grams in Venice, Italy?Sending a letter to Manila/Philippines to be picked up at the post office (Poste Restante)Where do you buy moleskin in Italy?Schengen Visa for Italy
Why does allocating a single 2D array take longer than a loop allocating multiple 1D arrays of the same total size and shape?
Without exposing his identity, did Roy help his parents with money so that they can afford to stay in their home?
how do you value what your leisure time is worth?
Why didn't Snape ask Dumbledore why he let "Moody" search his office?
Difference between $HOME and ~
Transiting through Switzerland by coach with lots of cash
Can a Dragon enter the feywild at will?
one-liner vs script
What kind of mission objective would make a parabolic escape trajectory desirable?
Landing Hero: Product snippets VS illustrations
D&D Monsters and Copyright
How to make a gift without seeming creepy?
Is insurance company’s preferred auto shop biased?
What is the fastest way to move in Borderlands 3?
Why can I ping 10.0.0.0/8 addresses from a 192.168.1.0/24 subnet?
Relation between signal processing and control systems engineering?
How much money should I save in order to generate $1000/month for the rest of my life?
What are the rules for punctuating a conversation?
What is /dev/null and why can't I use hx on it?
Scalar `new T` vs array `new T[1]`
Should I reveal productivity tricks to peers, or keep them to myself in order to be more productive than the others?
3x3 self-descriptive squares
What if you can't publish in very high impact journal or top conference during your PhD?
I pay for a service, but I miss the broadcast
Postal services in Italy - Poste Italiane vs. Friendpost vs. GPS
Is Canadian Visa Expert a legitimate company or a scam?Free wifi situation in ItalyGeneral Visit visa enquire for ItalyIs it normal for menus to be priced in grams in Venice, Italy?Sending a letter to Manila/Philippines to be picked up at the post office (Poste Restante)Where do you buy moleskin in Italy?Schengen Visa for Italy
.everyoneloves__top-leaderboard:empty,.everyoneloves__mid-leaderboard:empty,.everyoneloves__bot-mid-leaderboard:empty
margin-bottom:0;
There are at least three competing postal services in Italy - the government-ran Poste Italiane, and private duo of Globe Postal Service (GPS) and Friendpost, which primarily target tourist customers.
What should one expect when using their services?
How fast and reliable are they? Are they a borderline scam as some people say online?
italy scams mail
asked 8 hours ago
JohnEyeJohnEye
5141 gold badge3 silver badges13 bronze badges
add a comment
|
There are at least three competing postal services in Italy - the government-ran Poste Italiane, and private duo of Globe Postal Service (GPS) and Friendpost, which primarily target tourist customers.
What should one expect when using their services?
How fast and reliable are they? Are they a borderline scam as some people say online?
italy scams mail
asked 8 hours ago
JohnEyeJohnEye
5141 gold badge3 silver badges13 bronze badges
add a comment
|
There are at least three competing postal services in Italy - the government-ran Poste Italiane, and private duo of Globe Postal Service (GPS) and Friendpost, which primarily target tourist customers.
What should one expect when using their services?
How fast and reliable are they? Are they a borderline scam as some people say online?
italy scams mail
asked 8 hours ago
JohnEyeJohnEye
5141 gold badge3 silver badges13 bronze badges
There are at least three competing postal services in Italy - the government-ran Poste Italiane, and private duo of Globe Postal Service (GPS) and Friendpost, which primarily target tourist customers.
What should one expect when using their services?
How fast and reliable are they? Are they a borderline scam as some people say online?
italy scams mail
italy scams mail
asked 8 hours ago
JohnEyeJohnEye
5141 gold badge3 silver badges13 bronze badges
asked 8 hours ago
JohnEyeJohnEye
5141 gold badge3 silver badges13 bronze badges
asked 8 hours ago
JohnEyeJohnEye
5141 gold badge3 silver badges13 bronze badges
asked 8 hours ago
JohnEyeJohnEye
5141 gold badge3 silver badges13 bronze badges
asked 8 hours ago
JohnEyeJohnEye
5141 gold badge3 silver badges13 bronze badges
5141 gold badge3 silver badges13 bronze badges
add a comment
|
add a comment
|
1 Answer
1
active
oldest
votes
I visited Sardinia this summer and when buying the first batch of postcards, I asked the cashier in the souvenir shop for stamps. He sold me a couple, but when I was sticking them on later, I found that the stamps looked different from what I previously bought elsewhere. I looked online to find some information about them and found that people complain about this service as being extremely unreliable and slow.
When life gives you a GPS stamp, make an experiment, I thought. So I obtained stamps from all three available vendors and sent myself some vacation postcards from Sardinia to Czech Republic. Here are the results together with some notes about each vendor:
Poste Italiane
- Red mailboxes all over Italy, very easy to find
- Cheapest service
- Stamps are supposedly available in tabaccherias, but they are always sold out
- Stamps are generally not available in souvenir shops
- Time to delivery: 14 days
Globe Postal Service (GPS)
- Available in the vast majority of souvenir shops and some tabaccherias, they must have good incentives for the shop owners
- Service a bit more expensive than Poste Italiane
- As part of the service you get "tracking", but it only tells you that they handled the postcard. There is a QR code on the stamp which the recipient can open using their mobile phone and confirm receipt.
- You should only throw the postcards into their own mailboxes, otherwise they will not be delivered. They are very explicit about this, but many people still complain about doing this accidentally
- Time to delivery: 22 days
Friendpost
- Rather rare to find, so one should be careful to have the postcards ready to be sent immediately after buying the stamps when choosing this vendor, otherwise it's very difficult to find their mailbox
- Same as GPS, they are mostly found in souvenir shops
- Price is comparable to GPS
- They also have "tracking" like GPS, but without the QR code. Otherwise it works the same
- What is quite awesome is their Lost & Found service. Not sure how useful this is, but if they could not deliver your postcard, they scan it and put the picture online. It's quite entertaining to browse through the gallery
- Time to delivery: 32 days
From my experience, none of the services are as unreliable as the people on TripAdvisor say. Friendpost is the slowest, but I think this is because they have a sparse network, so they cannot afford to collect the postcards as often as GPS.
In none of the cases the delivery took several months, although it is slow indeed, especially considering that they were delivered within the EU. I recently received a postcard from New Caledonia, about 6 months after it was sent, so things could be worse than that.
All of the postcards arrived to their destination okay, none were lost or damaged.
answered 8 hours ago
JohnEyeJohnEye
5141 gold badge3 silver badges13 bronze badges
add a comment
|
Your Answer
StackExchange.ready(function()
var channelOptions =
tags: "".split(" "),
id: "273"
;
initTagRenderer("".split(" "), "".split(" "), channelOptions);
StackExchange.using("externalEditor", function()
// Have to fire editor after snippets, if snippets enabled
if (StackExchange.settings.snippets.snippetsEnabled)
StackExchange.using("snippets", function()
createEditor();
);
else
createEditor();
);
function createEditor()
StackExchange.prepareEditor(
heartbeatType: 'answer',
autoActivateHeartbeat: false,
convertImagesToLinks: false,
noModals: true,
showLowRepImageUploadWarning: true,
reputationToPostImages: null,
bindNavPrevention: true,
postfix: "",
imageUploader:
brandingHtml: "Powered by u003ca class="icon-imgur-white" href="https://imgur.com/"u003eu003c/au003e",
contentPolicyHtml: "User contributions licensed under u003ca href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"u003ecc by-sa 4.0 with attribution requiredu003c/au003e u003ca href="https://stackoverflow.com/legal/content-policy"u003e(content policy)u003c/au003e",
allowUrls: true
,
noCode: true, onDemand: true,
discardSelector: ".discard-answer"
,immediatelyShowMarkdownHelp:true
);
);
Sign up or log in
StackExchange.ready(function ()
StackExchange.helpers.onClickDraftSave('#login-link');
);
Sign up using Google
Sign up using Facebook
Sign up using Email and Password
Post as a guest
Required, but never shown
StackExchange.ready(
function ()
StackExchange.openid.initPostLogin('.new-post-login', 'https%3a%2f%2ftravel.stackexchange.com%2fquestions%2f147821%2fpostal-services-in-italy-poste-italiane-vs-friendpost-vs-gps%23new-answer', 'question_page');
);
Post as a guest
Required, but never shown
1 Answer
1
active
oldest
votes
1 Answer
1
active
oldest
votes
active
oldest
votes
active
oldest
votes
I visited Sardinia this summer and when buying the first batch of postcards, I asked the cashier in the souvenir shop for stamps. He sold me a couple, but when I was sticking them on later, I found that the stamps looked different from what I previously bought elsewhere. I looked online to find some information about them and found that people complain about this service as being extremely unreliable and slow.
When life gives you a GPS stamp, make an experiment, I thought. So I obtained stamps from all three available vendors and sent myself some vacation postcards from Sardinia to Czech Republic. Here are the results together with some notes about each vendor:
Poste Italiane
- Red mailboxes all over Italy, very easy to find
- Cheapest service
- Stamps are supposedly available in tabaccherias, but they are always sold out
- Stamps are generally not available in souvenir shops
- Time to delivery: 14 days
Globe Postal Service (GPS)
- Available in the vast majority of souvenir shops and some tabaccherias, they must have good incentives for the shop owners
- Service a bit more expensive than Poste Italiane
- As part of the service you get "tracking", but it only tells you that they handled the postcard. There is a QR code on the stamp which the recipient can open using their mobile phone and confirm receipt.
- You should only throw the postcards into their own mailboxes, otherwise they will not be delivered. They are very explicit about this, but many people still complain about doing this accidentally
- Time to delivery: 22 days
Friendpost
- Rather rare to find, so one should be careful to have the postcards ready to be sent immediately after buying the stamps when choosing this vendor, otherwise it's very difficult to find their mailbox
- Same as GPS, they are mostly found in souvenir shops
- Price is comparable to GPS
- They also have "tracking" like GPS, but without the QR code. Otherwise it works the same
- What is quite awesome is their Lost & Found service. Not sure how useful this is, but if they could not deliver your postcard, they scan it and put the picture online. It's quite entertaining to browse through the gallery
- Time to delivery: 32 days
From my experience, none of the services are as unreliable as the people on TripAdvisor say. Friendpost is the slowest, but I think this is because they have a sparse network, so they cannot afford to collect the postcards as often as GPS.
In none of the cases the delivery took several months, although it is slow indeed, especially considering that they were delivered within the EU. I recently received a postcard from New Caledonia, about 6 months after it was sent, so things could be worse than that.
All of the postcards arrived to their destination okay, none were lost or damaged.
answered 8 hours ago
JohnEyeJohnEye
5141 gold badge3 silver badges13 bronze badges
add a comment
|
I visited Sardinia this summer and when buying the first batch of postcards, I asked the cashier in the souvenir shop for stamps. He sold me a couple, but when I was sticking them on later, I found that the stamps looked different from what I previously bought elsewhere. I looked online to find some information about them and found that people complain about this service as being extremely unreliable and slow.
When life gives you a GPS stamp, make an experiment, I thought. So I obtained stamps from all three available vendors and sent myself some vacation postcards from Sardinia to Czech Republic. Here are the results together with some notes about each vendor:
Poste Italiane
- Red mailboxes all over Italy, very easy to find
- Cheapest service
- Stamps are supposedly available in tabaccherias, but they are always sold out
- Stamps are generally not available in souvenir shops
- Time to delivery: 14 days
Globe Postal Service (GPS)
- Available in the vast majority of souvenir shops and some tabaccherias, they must have good incentives for the shop owners
- Service a bit more expensive than Poste Italiane
- As part of the service you get "tracking", but it only tells you that they handled the postcard. There is a QR code on the stamp which the recipient can open using their mobile phone and confirm receipt.
- You should only throw the postcards into their own mailboxes, otherwise they will not be delivered. They are very explicit about this, but many people still complain about doing this accidentally
- Time to delivery: 22 days
Friendpost
- Rather rare to find, so one should be careful to have the postcards ready to be sent immediately after buying the stamps when choosing this vendor, otherwise it's very difficult to find their mailbox
- Same as GPS, they are mostly found in souvenir shops
- Price is comparable to GPS
- They also have "tracking" like GPS, but without the QR code. Otherwise it works the same
- What is quite awesome is their Lost & Found service. Not sure how useful this is, but if they could not deliver your postcard, they scan it and put the picture online. It's quite entertaining to browse through the gallery
- Time to delivery: 32 days
From my experience, none of the services are as unreliable as the people on TripAdvisor say. Friendpost is the slowest, but I think this is because they have a sparse network, so they cannot afford to collect the postcards as often as GPS.
In none of the cases the delivery took several months, although it is slow indeed, especially considering that they were delivered within the EU. I recently received a postcard from New Caledonia, about 6 months after it was sent, so things could be worse than that.
All of the postcards arrived to their destination okay, none were lost or damaged.
answered 8 hours ago
JohnEyeJohnEye
5141 gold badge3 silver badges13 bronze badges
add a comment
|
I visited Sardinia this summer and when buying the first batch of postcards, I asked the cashier in the souvenir shop for stamps. He sold me a couple, but when I was sticking them on later, I found that the stamps looked different from what I previously bought elsewhere. I looked online to find some information about them and found that people complain about this service as being extremely unreliable and slow.
When life gives you a GPS stamp, make an experiment, I thought. So I obtained stamps from all three available vendors and sent myself some vacation postcards from Sardinia to Czech Republic. Here are the results together with some notes about each vendor:
Poste Italiane
- Red mailboxes all over Italy, very easy to find
- Cheapest service
- Stamps are supposedly available in tabaccherias, but they are always sold out
- Stamps are generally not available in souvenir shops
- Time to delivery: 14 days
Globe Postal Service (GPS)
- Available in the vast majority of souvenir shops and some tabaccherias, they must have good incentives for the shop owners
- Service a bit more expensive than Poste Italiane
- As part of the service you get "tracking", but it only tells you that they handled the postcard. There is a QR code on the stamp which the recipient can open using their mobile phone and confirm receipt.
- You should only throw the postcards into their own mailboxes, otherwise they will not be delivered. They are very explicit about this, but many people still complain about doing this accidentally
- Time to delivery: 22 days
Friendpost
- Rather rare to find, so one should be careful to have the postcards ready to be sent immediately after buying the stamps when choosing this vendor, otherwise it's very difficult to find their mailbox
- Same as GPS, they are mostly found in souvenir shops
- Price is comparable to GPS
- They also have "tracking" like GPS, but without the QR code. Otherwise it works the same
- What is quite awesome is their Lost & Found service. Not sure how useful this is, but if they could not deliver your postcard, they scan it and put the picture online. It's quite entertaining to browse through the gallery
- Time to delivery: 32 days
From my experience, none of the services are as unreliable as the people on TripAdvisor say. Friendpost is the slowest, but I think this is because they have a sparse network, so they cannot afford to collect the postcards as often as GPS.
In none of the cases the delivery took several months, although it is slow indeed, especially considering that they were delivered within the EU. I recently received a postcard from New Caledonia, about 6 months after it was sent, so things could be worse than that.
All of the postcards arrived to their destination okay, none were lost or damaged.
answered 8 hours ago
JohnEyeJohnEye
5141 gold badge3 silver badges13 bronze badges
I visited Sardinia this summer and when buying the first batch of postcards, I asked the cashier in the souvenir shop for stamps. He sold me a couple, but when I was sticking them on later, I found that the stamps looked different from what I previously bought elsewhere. I looked online to find some information about them and found that people complain about this service as being extremely unreliable and slow.
When life gives you a GPS stamp, make an experiment, I thought. So I obtained stamps from all three available vendors and sent myself some vacation postcards from Sardinia to Czech Republic. Here are the results together with some notes about each vendor:
Poste Italiane
- Red mailboxes all over Italy, very easy to find
- Cheapest service
- Stamps are supposedly available in tabaccherias, but they are always sold out
- Stamps are generally not available in souvenir shops
- Time to delivery: 14 days
Globe Postal Service (GPS)
- Available in the vast majority of souvenir shops and some tabaccherias, they must have good incentives for the shop owners
- Service a bit more expensive than Poste Italiane
- As part of the service you get "tracking", but it only tells you that they handled the postcard. There is a QR code on the stamp which the recipient can open using their mobile phone and confirm receipt.
- You should only throw the postcards into their own mailboxes, otherwise they will not be delivered. They are very explicit about this, but many people still complain about doing this accidentally
- Time to delivery: 22 days
Friendpost
- Rather rare to find, so one should be careful to have the postcards ready to be sent immediately after buying the stamps when choosing this vendor, otherwise it's very difficult to find their mailbox
- Same as GPS, they are mostly found in souvenir shops
- Price is comparable to GPS
- They also have "tracking" like GPS, but without the QR code. Otherwise it works the same
- What is quite awesome is their Lost & Found service. Not sure how useful this is, but if they could not deliver your postcard, they scan it and put the picture online. It's quite entertaining to browse through the gallery
- Time to delivery: 32 days
From my experience, none of the services are as unreliable as the people on TripAdvisor say. Friendpost is the slowest, but I think this is because they have a sparse network, so they cannot afford to collect the postcards as often as GPS.
In none of the cases the delivery took several months, although it is slow indeed, especially considering that they were delivered within the EU. I recently received a postcard from New Caledonia, about 6 months after it was sent, so things could be worse than that.
All of the postcards arrived to their destination okay, none were lost or damaged.
answered 8 hours ago
JohnEyeJohnEye
5141 gold badge3 silver badges13 bronze badges
answered 8 hours ago
JohnEyeJohnEye
5141 gold badge3 silver badges13 bronze badges
answered 8 hours ago
JohnEyeJohnEye
5141 gold badge3 silver badges13 bronze badges
answered 8 hours ago
JohnEyeJohnEye
5141 gold badge3 silver badges13 bronze badges
5141 gold badge3 silver badges13 bronze badges
add a comment
|
add a comment
|
Thanks for contributing an answer to Travel Stack Exchange!
- Please be sure to answer the question. Provide details and share your research!
But avoid …
- Asking for help, clarification, or responding to other answers.
- Making statements based on opinion; back them up with references or personal experience.
To learn more, see our tips on writing great answers.
Sign up or log in
StackExchange.ready(function ()
StackExchange.helpers.onClickDraftSave('#login-link');
);
Sign up using Google
Sign up using Facebook
Sign up using Email and Password
Post as a guest
Required, but never shown
StackExchange.ready(
function ()
StackExchange.openid.initPostLogin('.new-post-login', 'https%3a%2f%2ftravel.stackexchange.com%2fquestions%2f147821%2fpostal-services-in-italy-poste-italiane-vs-friendpost-vs-gps%23new-answer', 'question_page');
);
Post as a guest
Required, but never shown
Sign up or log in
StackExchange.ready(function ()
StackExchange.helpers.onClickDraftSave('#login-link');
);
Sign up using Google
Sign up using Facebook
Sign up using Email and Password
Post as a guest
Required, but never shown
Sign up or log in
StackExchange.ready(function ()
StackExchange.helpers.onClickDraftSave('#login-link');
);
Sign up using Google
Sign up using Facebook
Sign up using Email and Password
Post as a guest
Required, but never shown
Sign up or log in
StackExchange.ready(function ()
StackExchange.helpers.onClickDraftSave('#login-link');
);
Sign up using Google
Sign up using Facebook
Sign up using Email and Password
Sign up using Google
Sign up using Facebook
Sign up using Email and Password
Post as a guest
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
Required, but never shown
