Local courier services less expensive, but reliable

Joseph Kirschke, Contributor, Jakarta

In 1998, Hubert Fournier was working as an organizer for a painting exhibition in Jakarta. Using a single courier, he sent out 1,000 invitations to people -- expats and locals alike -- across the city.

Unfortunately, he recalled, a third of them arrived late.

Nevertheless, Fournier, now a business consultant for international companies that want to settle in Jakarta, admits he was at fault in expecting too much in too little time.

"It was my fault really," said Fournier, a French national who has lived in Jakarta for eight years and also works as an education consultant for European schools.

Like many expats in Indonesia who rely on courier services -- as opposed to the sometimes unreliable postal network here -- Fournier said he was more than happy with the services available and was consistently amazed at the quality he got for a small cost.

It was easy to get the ball rolling, Fournier said. All he needed to do was to have his secretary pick up the phone and make "five or six" calls.

About the companies' responses, "they are very aggressive (competitors) by phone and by fax," he said. "There are many operators to choose from."

There is, however, one prominent disadvantage Fournier sees -- the need to switch to different couriers in the event their quality decreases due to a change of drivers.

"One company can be very good for a while," he said, "but after six months, the quality can go down."

Still, he added, with costs as low as Rp 1,500 (about US$ 0.20) per piece of mail, "you cannot be too negative since the costs are very cheap -- sometimes too cheap."

Having formerly worked with couriers in Milan, Italy, Fournier says there is no room for comparison with the excellent work of Indonesian drivers. "It's totally incomparable -- it's marvelous," he said. "Sometimes I can't believe the costs compared to what some of these couriers do."

Australian Ala Sulistyono recommends expatriates do a little bit of investigation on their own if they want to send a package somewhere overseas -- or within Indonesia, for that matter -- to see what the most reasonable rates are.

"I would say shop around -- because the prices are so varied," said Sulistyono, who has lived in Jakarta for 21 years, and is married to an Indonesian.

Sulistyono wound up using TNT courier services when her 17- year-old daughter Alexia was taking an Australian distance learning program from Melbourne's Distance Education Center.

"It was great," she said, noting that she did most of her research on the Internet. "You could see what stage the package was at -- and the price was excellent."

At the end of the course, she and her daughter sent a 16- kilogram package containing two years worth of work, which included a folio of oil paintings, a visual diary and sketches so Alexia could get her Victorian Certificate of Education.

More often than not, couriers are dealt with not by expats themselves but rather by their Indonesian employees.

Such is the case with Sri Newindrati, the assistant to the New Zealand Aid officer and manager of the scholarship and educational fund at the Embassy of New Zealand.

Sri uses DHL to ship a diplomatic pouch -- most often filled with sensitive documents like passports and diplomatic correspondence -- every Tuesday. Returned correspondence and other mail arrives again via DHL each Thursday.

That, according to Sri, is the easy part. Things tend to get a little more complicated when she needs to ship passports and other documents within the sprawling Indonesian archipelago.

Java is not an issue. "As long as the destination of a package is in Java, it will probably get there within one to three days," said Sri, who works with PT Tiki Jalur Nugraha Ekakurir in sending documents to Indonesian cities outside Java.

The problems lie elsewhere -- notably far-flung and hard-to- reach locations. "I never know if it's going out today or not," she said. "It's dependent on local airlines which can be delayed."

For example: "If it's in a city outside Jayapura, it can take one week or two weeks," she said.

Sri, however, believes Tiki does a good job given the challenges it faces when shipping packages to remote places. "Tiki has representatives all over Indonesia," she said.