Letters: France's confusing postcode system is the bane of our lives
Connexion reader uses parcel drop-off points to receive and take parcel deliveries
Reader says he now collects parcels from pick-up points
Arcady/Shutterstock
To the Editor,
Thank you for your recent article on how to deal with missing parcels. This has been the bane of our lives since moving to France seven years ago.
There are a number of issues.
Firstly, the lack of specificity of the code postal. This gives a localisation much inferior to the UK postcode, which is to a road and often just a few houses, or the much superior Irish Eircode, which is specific to the receiving postbox, in most cases, the house.
Our code postal covers five villages, and if the courier picks the first, they end up at the wrong town and are unable to find us.
The next problem is that the databases used for letters are different from parcels. When we sent letters during the pandemic, we could add our address as it was in the database, but not on the systems that dealt with parcels!
Finally, there is the issue of "non-conforming addresses". The French system mandates that a house is numbered by its distance in metres from the start of the road, odd numbers on the right, even on the left.
The "start" of the road is the nearest point to the town centre. This somewhat falls apart in rural areas and on those roads that circle a town rather than radiate away from its centre, but it works in most cases.
However, it takes no account of historical addresses/roads established before this came into force and is also seen as an imposition from Paris by local officials who deal with it accordingly, by making sure it works as badly as possible.
On our lotissement, many houses have letters as well as a number, which leads to even more confusion. Our neighbour is at 17i, so many delivery drivers are seeking 171.
Recently, we had a letter from our mairie notifying us of a new official address.
We were to be designated as 15 Quattro on a road that ran perpendicular to our property. The Quattro bit was because they associated our house with three others that we have never had any connection to.
We tried sending letters to this address, but they never turned up. The only people who seem aware of this new address is EDF.
Regarding parcels, we have given up having anything delivered to our house and instead use local parcel drop-off points. These are more secure and give us greater freedom. We don't have to wait for the courier to fail to find us.
As to our postal address, we will just continue to extract the remaining few follicles from our rapidly balding heads.
Michael J Lynch, by email
Have you experienced issues with receiving post? Let us know at letters@connexionfrance.com
