It is surprising how many large companies which like to think of themselves as international, and who advertise in the international press can’t cope with having customers in countries other than their home land.
From our own recent experience:
- A subsidiary of a British bank – one of the national brands – can’t cope with a German address – the postcode always gets printed on a separate line before the town (it should be on the same line as the town, preceding the town name). Very strange, as in the UK it would be printed after the town on it’s own line.
- A large Spanish bank has even larger problems, they insist on prefixing the street name with a choice of Spanish words meaning “street”, “avenue” etc. Their IT systems don’t give either their own staff or online-banking customers the possibility of setting the value to blank; they also insist on inserting a comma before the house number. So you end up getting mail addressed to Calle Hauptstrasse, 14 or what ever. They also put the postcode in the wrong line and insist on inserting a decimal point between characters 2 and 3 of the code. The result in Germany is that the post gets returned to the bank without being delivered.
It’s enough to make you tear your hair out. We’re used to American companies not being able to cope with foreign addresses, but Europe is full of little nations, so you’d think that European companies would have had plenty of practice with different address formats.
We get wrongly addressed mail too, but then only from the U.S.A.
The zip code, is listed incorrectly behind the town, but it gets delivered.
As a matter of fact, we moved from one address to another one, same street though, 13 years ago and we still receive mail addressed to the old one.
Yes, I have told my friends to note the new address, but it goes unnoticed as the street name is the same.
Maybe our postal clerks here in Oberursel are more international than the international companies you deal with.
We get quite a bit of wrongly addressed mail from friends in UK (it always surprises me how people can’t transfer an address from a letterhead to their address book without reformatting it), but it usually gets delivered, sometimes with a delay. But the address on letters from the bank in Spain is really mangled, and the bank has told us that two letters have been returned as undeliverable in the last two months.
What is annoying is that even their own staff in the branch office in Xàtiva have no possibility to format the address correctly. I think as soon as we have researched for better alternatives, we’ll be changing bank!
[...] to Address a Woman After having read Key’s Corner most recent post International? Not us Mate! about the difficulty of some international companies getting the mailing address right in Germany, [...]
It happens the other way around as well! I remember a job offer from Germany being sent to my then UK address without the country written in full, but with the postcode BEFORE the town and GB- before the postcode.