Has anyone used the Postal Service to ship a bike? A ST lurker is heading to Kona and has had bad experiences with the airlines and UPS and USPS is cheaper than FedEx.
TIA.
clm
Can you? I don’t think they’ll take a package that big.
http://www.usps.com/send/preparemailandpackages/measuringtips.htm
FedEx is the way to go for sure. They take very good care of packages. It’s all I will use, having worked in shops for years and 1 year as an Ebay reseller.
I’m assuming it’s freight. The USPS quote is quite a bit less than FedEx.
clm
I 2nd the FedEx nod. I’ve used both air and ground and found them to be really great. Superior tracking and the boxes always look OK meaning they have not been banged around.
IMHO even if FedEx was $50 more each way it woudl be worth it for my uber $$$$ bikes.
I would be concerned about arrival time. I would go with Fedex before trying the post office. I don’t konw anyone who has ever used them for a bike.
Cathy, we use USPS every day shipping bodyboards to Hawaii, which go in a box just a bit smaller than a bike box. We mostly use Priority Mail, and I’d say 95% of the shipments arrive to the Big Island within a week, but there are 5% that can take MUCH longer (sometimes over 2 weeks) and with Priority Mail, there’s no tracking, so you never know where it is if it doesn’t make it there. Express Mail is often not much more than Priority, but it’s faster and fully trackable, though the USPS’s idea of tracking is much less detailed than UPS/Fedex.
Shipped my wifes mountain bike from Houston to Oahu when we moved. It cost about half what Fed-Ex/UPS wanted, but it took 25 days. If I recall, for that size going by boat was the only option with USPS.