I wish you both best of luck and hope your postcards wing their way between Lincoln and Dresden.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the concept, and have thought about trying it, I just think the timing is wrong,
Pandemic and many Mail Centres still have a backlog from Christmas.
I know my local Mail Centre has quite a large catchment area serving the suburbs of West and North London through to the neighbouring towns in the counties of Buckinghamshire & Berkshire. So this system wouldn’t work for me or at least with a heavy delay.
If I lived on a farm in Northern Ireland or on the Scottish Western Isles, maybe better as the postal service becomes more personalised, me thinks?
I like to think that the posties and sorting team in my local Mail Centre/Delivery Office recognise my address/handwriting with the amount post I now send.
I have to also credit them too, back in November I’ve had post delivered to Edinburgh from London overnight on 2nd Class rates.
No doubt you both will keep us informed here or on the other forum post.
Correction… Not always as far away from each other as I though. Two of three similar options were in Norway when I tried another combination. But the locations are around 330 km apart by car.
Deutsche Post doesn’t use what3words, you don’t find anything about it on their website. So I doubt that they’re aware of this system.
Wikipedia states that only a few African countries have implemented what3words in their postal system.
A postcard addressed like this won’t go through the automatic sorting process and travel way longer. If the sorting centre can’t find the address, the card will probably go lost - I don’t know how much effort they’ll put in to identify the address, or if a postcard which can not be delivered even will be sent to the Briefermittlungsstelle in Marburg (where they try to find the sender).
Interesting system! The three-word addresses seem to be an effective mnemonic for remembering coordinates in place of longitude and latitude. What about altitude by the way?
My understanding is that What3Words is a proprietary system — its not an open standard and it is not free for anyone to use (particularly not for postal operators).
If a postcard makes it to to its destination in say, Germany, using only the What3Words, I would say it’s due to a lot of luck in finding the hands of a postal employee with extra time on their hands (ah!) at the sorting center (since it can’t be sorted automatically) that already heard of What3Words and then will try to translate that into a regular address equivalent so that the mail carrier will later use to try to deliver to it — all this, I suspect, with a (tiny) risk of getting Deutsche Post in legal trouble.
Please don’t use it in Postcrossing. That will most likely get postcards lost — even if it may work sometimes, just by pure luck.
As a side note: I have read that there’s several other problems with What3Words, from ambiguous precision, to using inappropriate words to identify locations. Wikipedia as a starting point but it’s easy to find many other criticisms about it if one searches for it.
The idea of a more universal addressing system is an interesting one… but I don’t think What3Words is it.
Hi thank you. I would NEVER use What3Words for postcrossing official postcards. Myself and another member have agreed to a swap and know the risk if we never get our postcard. It would be nice if the system worked, but well it has it’s issues…
Thanks for the update. I had wondered if the cards had arrived using What3Words, and was intrigued after reading “The Address Book” that was reviewed on the Postcrossing blog for addressing the non-addressed (i.e. slums, or areas without traditional addressing with house numbers, streets, etc). It really is an interesting idea, and although this experiment failed it is still something to think about for long term mail services in under served areas.
