Today I had to ship some documents that needed to be in the U.S. by Thursday. Since the urgent version of Swisspost takes 3 days to the U.S., I was recommended to register online with Fedex and have them pick the documents up and ship them. So I proceeded, I registered online on fedex.com in order to get an account number and be able to proceed. After registration, I got a nice message saying that a fedex employee would get back to me within the next business day with my account number (no account number= no shipping). so much for my urgent shipment. Things got even more surreal when a couple of minutes later I got the following email:

Dear customer,

If your e-mail is sent from our Internet Website, your request will be handled.

I will be out of the office until Wednesday 14th November and back on Thursday 15th November.


So the take home message is: when confronted with urgent international shipments, forget about Fedex, but go for DHL (guaranteed delivery on Thursday for a whopping 159 CHF) or UPS.

Never had a problem with FedEx in Zug -- 1 day delivery to the US has been very reliable with them.

We've used DHL. Overnight service for CHF 44, an envelope same size as a FedEX letter, I think. We dropped it off at the Bern train station, it goes to Basel and on it's way. I looked into FedEX, but it was incredibly expensive for the same service.