Thursday 13 / March / 2025
Muscat: Delivery of letters and parcels on your doorstep may soon become a reality, as Oman Post is currently running a pilot project for a larger unified postal system in Muscat.
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In a groundbreaking offering in the country, Oman Post started its pilot at the Al Mouj Muscat, with residents of the waterfront apartment blocks being the first ones to receive the service.
It includes the delivery of both parcels and letters, and has been in operation from September this year. Al Mouj has a community of 4,000 residents in total.
A lot of Asian and Western countries already have countrywide postal systems in place, and early this year Emirates Post Group in the UAE also announced the launch of a new service that allows residents of select villa communities to enjoy the facility and get mails delivered to their doorstep.
“Our Al Mouj pilot project officially started just a few weeks ago, and it will still be a long time until we see results. We are doing it for the first time and we will see how people react to it, as this service is on-demand,” Abdulmalik Al Balushi, Chief Executive Officer at Oman Post, said.
In the next few months though, the service will be extended to the villas at the Al Mouj complex, and besides this Oman Post is also looking at expanding it to other Integrated Tourism Complexes (ITCs) in Muscat.
“Right now we are trying to promote the service along with the Al Mouj administration. We are currently doing this only in apartment buildings, but Al Mouj is working on designing and fixing boxes for the villas and once that is done, it will take about five or six months until we can extend the services to the villas as well.
“At this stage I think we want to test this service, and so we are working with team-based organisations, and Al Mouj has a team in place,but we are on the lookout for other ITCs as well. So if they are willing, we can do the same thing for them.”
Considering the expansion of services, Al Balushi says that Al Mouj is a simple example, (it’s) not a city, and so it is easier to run the service there, “They have everything mapped out, you know the locations of the apartments, but in a city, it is very difficult and in the next few months we are going to work on Al Mouj and look at improvement areas.”
Currently, there are 19 post offices in Muscat and 83 across the country where letters and parcels get delivered to the post boxes of individuals or companies.
“These post offices are also addresses, and you can simply write to the post office address and get your stuff delivered there. Now, when it comes to specifically going to homes or offices, we need to look at some innovative ideas for that.”
With the improvement of services though, Al Balushi says that the costs will rise too, “I just want to raise a warning here, everything is at a cost. Delivery to a post office is totally different, for example if you go to the UAE, the pricing for delivery to personalised addresses is around OMR80 a year, whereas delivery to a post office will cost you around OMR30 for personal use, so the price difference is more than twice.”
“Our prices today reflect our actual cost which requires change. However, services like home delivery have to be at a higher price than post box delivery.”
Along with the opening of a call centre, Al Balushi added that e-commerce will be a big focus for next year, “We are looking to providing delivery on demand from next year, so basically demands based on the customers’ requirements, delivery of express mails and e-commerce packages.
“Today we are dependent on traditional postal service, but going towards the future, we have to look at different areas like financial services, e-commerce, and third party government services.
“On–demand will also provide customer to customer delivery, so if customers want something to be picked up and delivered to another citizen or resident within Muscat, this product will enable them to do that as well,” he added.
Oman Post also has plans for the interior regions, “There are some solutions that we looked at which will not be feasible outside Muscat, or outside the major cities, but some solutions can be.”
However he says, for making all of this possible, Oman Post will need to upgrade itself in some areas, “Some alternatives will require Oman Post to be advanced in its own internal system, so we are trying to work out different solutions, and hopefully by next year we will come up with something which is easier to implement, until the government has an addressing system in place.
“In delivery, there are areas like efficiency across the supply chain that need to be improved, our central sorting centre in Seeb is manual and we are looking at automating that. We are also looking at providing systems of track and trace, so these have to be upgraded and on top of this, people’s skills have to be upgraded.”
