Mail and Parcel Post

Mail and Parcel Post

There are nuances to the mail and parcel post in Costa Rica that you can begin preparation while in the States just to make things a little easier and have fewer things fall between the cracks once you are here. First, do not expect the mail man to show up at your mailbox each day with magazines, junk mail, bills, and letters from Aunt Matilda. I am going to guess conservatively that more than 90% of the country does not have a mail man to show up at their home. First of all, you won’t have a mailbox and secondly you won’t have a street address. So, how does this all work?

We have a post office box in Grecia that we visit every 3-4 weeks just to see if it has our electric bill, so we can monitor our usage at the house and I think my mother has sent a few things via snail mail to our P.O. Box, but that is about it. Someone sending a letter to that P.O. Box must use 90 cents worth of stamps, so it is definitely more expensive and it arrives in about 6 days. Everything else I have sent to my mother’s house, so obviously nothing very important gets sent there. So the key here to save lots of headaches (and lots of dough) is to cancel all your junk mail, because you can access all your favorite catalogs online, and if you have them mailed here, it will cost the sender or yourself more than a catalog is worth.

The second option, which we did also, is to join ARCR, the Association of Residents of Costa Rica at: http://arcr.net/index.html. They provide a number of services, one of which is a Miami address and all letters and parcels are then forwarded from Miami here to San Jose, where you can pick up your mail or parcels when they notify you by email that you have received something. It is not convenient to go there because it is almost an hour from our house to downtown San Jose, but we get maybe one or two letters a month and maybe one or two parcels a month. And it is not cheap either! Letters cost us about 70 cents on top of what the sender puts on their end. Parcels are charged based on size and weight. I consider this method only because I am an eBayer and most eBay sellers will not sell internationally, so it gives us a U.S. address to which items can be forwarded to us here when I can’t wait for a trip back to the U.S. to pick up the items myself.

The third and final option that I am aware of is a UPS store, and they are just like they are in the States, except again they charge you by weight of received mail or parcels by the month, and again this is in addition to sender charges. They have several programs to choose from and many of them are far closer to home than ARCR in downtown San Jose. Please call anytime at CostaRicaLandToday.Com if you have any questions about these services.