Australia Post has repurposed and opened 15 new processing facilities and recruited extra staff to manage growing demand.
Parcel deliveries have averaged almost two million a day since Easter and volumes have almost doubled in the last four weeks as households shop online as they self-isolate due to COVID-19.
Rod Barnes, acting group chief operating officer of Australia Post, said staff are working hard to manage delays caused by limited flights, hygiene and social distancing requirements and an increase in volumes.
Australia Post is operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week and more than 600 casual staff have been employed, Barnes said.
To speed up services, eight additional freighter flights have been chartered, bringing the total number of air freighter services to 17 a day.
Barnes said, “These flights provide some relief and have improved our Express Post priority service deliveries across major capital cities by the next business day. Unfortunately, they do not substitute reduced access to capacity on passenger planes, and we cannot ensure the speed of deliveries at the same level as prior to the pandemic.”
Australia Post has received regulatory relief from the Federal Government, reducing the frequency of metropolitan letter deliveries to every second day, freeing up staff to be retrained and redeployed into delivery vans to process parcels.
Barnes said, “We’re progressively making these changes and continue to look at ways to optimize our delivery network to meet the current demand of parcel volumes. The majority of parcels are still arriving on time, but we ask and thank our customers for their patience, as we work as hard as we can to get parcels to you as quickly as possible.”