Hermes Parcel delivery > Reviews (59)

I have very patiently (and politely) spent the last two weeks trying to obtain some sort of delivery timescale for an item I ordered from House of Fraser on 5th December 2010 BS (before snow). It is now 22nd December 2010 AS (after snow) and sadly still no parcel and I have today been informed by a very embarassed man from House of Fraser that it will not be delivered in time for Christmas and therefore the Mother in Law has no Christmas present from her son and I. Now I actually like my mother in law, so this is a problem for me!

You may be wondering why I am not writing a negativer review for House of Fraser, well the point is, they have fulifilled their side and passed it onto the delivery company - Hermes, who have had it for 14 days now and are nowhere near even attempting to deliver.

Ok, so there has been a bit of snow the last two weeks - in Scotland, Cumbria, north of Watford etc, but my parcel has onlly gone from Nuneaton to Newmarket in 14 days and there it has remained. They've had a couple of inches for 1-2 days in that whole period and apparantly that has caused this enormous backlog that they can't deal with.

When i finally spoke to their Customer Service team today, I enquired as to their system of working through this backlog. Are they getting parcels out in any order? Are those that have been there the longest getting priority? You can imagine my lift in hope as he said yes, those that have been there longer will go first. "Great!" I said, "so mine should be on it's way then, you've had it for 2 weeks". Sadly his surprised chuckle made me realise that in the world of Hermes, 14 days to deliver a parcel from Nuneaton to Essex is not considered a long time. "Sorry" says amused man, "there's parcels that have been there muuucchhh longer than that!"

Apparantly it really is all because of the snow, with varying excuses from the vehicles to the drivers themselves. I'm wondering whether these poor delivery people from Hermes deliver on bicycles as I've managed to get to work every day for the last couple of weeks, Essex to Kent (with a quick trip down to Portsmouth inbetween) and I've only got a Nissan Micra, hardly an off road beast, hell I've even seen people on bicycles!

The next lot of excuses were the sheer volume of parcels as he reminded me, it's not just mine that's being delivered (he's starting to get a bit patronising now). "Oh yes" I say "I completely unserstand that. However, I've had several other itmes delivered from Amazon, Ebay etc using Parcelforce, HDL, all ordered upto a week after this item and all have been delivered despite battling the same sub arctic conditions and increased volumes due to Xmas." He didn't seem to like that much, especially as I then went back to his earlier comment of how there were parcels still not delivered from before mine (which takes it back to November, so before snow was even expected.

I think I'm starting to get a bit sarcastic with him now, especially as he's suggested that I go back to House of Fraser on Xmas eve and buy the item again, if it's not here by then.

"Good idea", I say "where do I send the receipt for Hermes to reinburse me for this gift, seeing as I bought it as a sale item and to get the same again is another £130?" (before you think I'm cheap, it was incidently the nicest, being on sale was an added bonus!) Sadly Hermes man wasn't playing by this point and was flagging a bit as I had picked lots of holes in his excuses and all that was left was they are just really disorganised and inefficient and unable to cope with the level of work they take on.

They certainly have no business having a contract with a company as big as House of Fraser, as the quality of their service is unable to match the demand, especially if there really is such a backlog before the added pressures of a little snow and Xmas took hold.

I didn't even mention to him the order that I placed with Shudoo early November that they couldn't get delivered until mid December, I felt I was just being mean by that point and the poor guy had had enough!