Post delivery failures put 350 Salzburg clients at risk

Post customers in Hallein and the city of Salzburg are reporting serious delivery problems, ORF reports. The Social Work association says it received no mail for several days before receiving a large batch of letters at once.

The delays are particularly problematic for medical and official documents. The association has 350 clients who use its address and are waiting for mail, including job offers from the AMS employment service.

Recipients must apply for those positions within eight days. Anyone who misses the deadline can be suspended from receiving services. “We often have to intervene with the AMS to explain that the client was not responsible,” social worker Astrid Pölzl said.

Pölzl said she had learned from another postal worker that nobody was currently assigned to the delivery route and that a colleague who had been trained for it had given up.

Austria’s postal service said holiday absences and illness-related staff shortages had caused irregularities on the route. Spokeswoman Gloria Kohlmaier said the backlog had been cleared completely and that mail would be delivered normally to the association in future.

The postal service said it was using the incident to provide additional training and remind staff of the need to deliver mail on time. It apologised for the delays.

In Hallein-Neualm, postal delays affecting private households were also caused by holiday replacement workers being unavailable, the company said. The spokeswoman said the disruption was regrettable.

The postal service added that the total number of letters being delivered was falling sharply. This could create the impression that deliveries were becoming less reliable, while the company was in fact handling fewer letters overall.