I made out today, that in Germany international postcards are only send by air, means the fastest way, if you put a special blue sticker with “Priority/prioritaire/Luftpost” on it, the system will not make it automatically. The stickers are free of charge, you can get it at the post office or download it or you can even write it by hand on it (direct above or underneath the adress). So hopefully, this may help to lower the number of exspired cards.
Do you have special leads for your country aswell?
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Not really any tips in Canada - all of our international lettermail goes by air as far as I’ve been able to tell.
The only way to make it go faster is to making the timing of dropping the mail off early in the day & at the beginning of the week.
There are some post boxes near private postal outlets that get picked up 2X a day vs 1X a day for most postboxes - that’s the only other thing that can speed things up.
Most international mail gets sent to super sorting plants & then flown from there.
So my mail in Ottawa goes to the Montreal super sorting plant & then flies from there, nothing much I can do to speed that up, lol
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Mail like letters and postcards nowadays are always sent via airmail from Germany to other countries. For this it makes no different if you use the prority/airmail sticker or not.
(Only for “DIALOGPOST INTERNATIONAL” and “PRESSE International” you can choose between land or sea route and - then the priority/airmail sticker is required - airmail.)
For making sure your mail is treated like priority mail also in the destination country the sticker is needed.
See the specific page of “international mail” at the website of Deutsche Post.
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We do have a priority sticker here in the Netherlands, generally the international stamps automatically include a priority stamp, but if you want to use other stamps you use a free priority stamp.
I’m unsure if it makes much of a difference though, on the site it states different delivery times for priority and non-priority. (Usually a few days or so) but I’m unsure of how it would be put into practice since I’m sure most international mail will be send by air post. With maybe an exception for mail going to like neighboring countries, since it’s so close I’d imagine a truck might bring it, but I’m not sure.
When I didn’t know yet you could ask for free priority stickers as a child, I remember sending mail internationally without it and it didn’t seem to make much of a difference in time. Perhaps post with a priority sticker on it will be put on the airplane faster and post without it might be removed and have to wait longer to be sent if there’s not enough room?