Internet, Telephone and Mail Overseas
OSCAR Forum: Open Discussion: Internet, Telephone and Mail Overseas
To answer Tony Whittaker (Soon) question, there is no collection charge, just the minimum fee of £15.00
So using it for a few letters would not be cost effective, but as I mentioned it does not take long to clock up £15 on overseas mail with Royal Mail.
Spring's website can be found at http://www.atspring.com/eng
Is there a collectin charge on top of this price, and is there an address to get more info?
blessings
tony
Any organisation which sends out overseas mail may want to consider a service of TNT - Spring (Nothing to do with the Spring Project I hasten to add.)
For example 10 letters weighing 65g would cost £14.20 by Royal Mail.
By Spring which is done by item number and weight the cost would be £3.41 (17p an item and £2.63/kilo - this means you do not pay extra for items slightly over the Royal Mail pricing bands. It based on the total weight of the letters.) Flats and packets can also be sent and the cost is similar to letters just a few pence more, but much much cheaper than Royal Mail costs for heavier items.
The minimum spend is £15 per consignment, so it is no good for single items, but it does not take much to reach £15 by Royal Mail, after which it would be cheaper to pay the mimimum and send by Spring.
When I sent some items to Hong Kong recently they took a week by the Premium Service, which is a little more, but not much. Standard Service to USA took about two weeks.
This service has saved us hundreds of pounds and I hope it can benefit other organisations to.
Richard Hubbard
The Spring Project
This discussion thread is for sharing experiences, suggestions or solutions for how to access Internet, phone or mail services from overseas. Feel free to contribute.
As an opener, the following services were used by me whilst on a 25 day visit to France:
Internet access - cheapest solution found was Tiscali France `Totale Liberte' (http://www.tiscali.fr) at 0,02 Euros per minute. This was billed through the phone system, but with access to a residential phone and an arrangement with the bill payer this was no problem! Email was accessed as normal, but smtp settings needed to be changed to be able to send email messages.
Phone access - cheapest solution found for making calls to the UK was Easy-Dial (http://www.easy-dial.com). This is a pre-pay account system where you open an account with a minimum of £25 and get phone access to their system via a freephone 0800 number, then by entering your username and password before dialing the required UK number. This means there is no charge to the phone that you use. The account is then charged for useage (6.9p per minute from France to UK).
Mail access - mail was redirected from the UK using the Royal Mail Redirection Service (http://www.royalmail.com). Cost for one month redirection was £12.60 and all post (including magazines and newspapers but not parcels) are forwarded on at no extra charge.
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