Tax and Duty

You do have to be careful of things not arriving. That has only happened to us once, because after that we have used Fed Ex or DHL.

Ditto on Bolish comments -- same for us in Dhahran, but with one recent exception. We've never had to pay duty on any of our (many, many) Aramex deliveries, however, for the first time, last week, I did have a surprise duty charge that I had to pay the driver, despite having paid for the shipping charges in advance online. The only difference with this package is that it is the largest and heaviest box I've had shipped over, and it was held up for a few days clearing customs, which usually isn't the case. I'm thinking that it was the size and weight of the package that took it off the usual pathway. Aramex is usually pretty reliable, but if you live on a street in the camp that is named for a city elsewhere in the Kingdom, be aware that your package may be sent to that other city and not to Dhahran! LOL I've had several frustrating calls to their customer service, trying to explain the difference and trying to get our package rerouted to the correct place.

We've been relying on family to send mail over to us via the Aramex US address, however, recently we set up a mail forwarding service that will ship to the Aramex address once a month. For us, it's just easier to have it all come from the same delivery company directly to our door. We've heard mixed comments from residents about whether or not packages sent via postal service will reach you with contents intact. Also were advised to have things like replacement credit cards sent by a courier, not through the mail. Could be incorrect advice though -- maybe someone else can describe their experience.

We've been using Aramex steadily for a year, and find it to avee about $12/lb, and it doesn't seem that dimensions matter.

I agree that lack of bundling is frustrating: If Aramex receives packages for you on the same day from different sources, they all get shipped, and of course charged for, individually. All you can do is try to plan accordingly. For example, I've learned to try to get everything from Amazon fulfilled by one source and shipped to our US Aramex address for free to minimize the number of Aramex deliveries and overall shipping costs. We learned after much frustration that Target and Apple won't ship to shop-and-ship addresses. Also had temp problem with Justice.com. In short, when you order online, be sure they're ok w/ Aramex address. It's caused us annoyances with order cancellations, fraud freezes and the like. Sometimes it's better to ship to a family member and then have them forward via Aramex. Also, for small bits of mail coming by Aramex, we've found it safer to have sent in 9x12 envelope, not bus size. We've had smaller envelopes lost in their NY office, only to show up bedgled and quite late. Bigger envelopes seem to be handled better.