When I am in the States and I order something in the morning from Amazon Prime, sometimes it arrives later that same day. I am still amazed by that.
But, you won't experience such quick delivery when ordering online while in Panama.
This is one of a 4 part, Mail in Panama, series. This is Part 4 - Get & Send Mail in Panama. I also cover alternative ways to mail letters and send faxes. Also see, Part 1 - What To Do About Your Current Mail, Part 2 – Postal Service in Panama, and Part 3 – Domestic Mail in Panama.
There are a number of ways to send a package to Panama.
I am sure you could also use the Postal service of most countries to send mail to Panama. However, I am only familiar with the US Postal Service so that is the only public postal service I discuss here.
Parcel shipping or forwarding services allow you to purchase from an online retailer, and have the products shipped to a USA address. The shipper will then consolidate the packages and ship them to you in Panama.
The majority of expats in Panama use one of these private mail services.
There are a number of mail services to choose from.
I reviewed mailing service recommendations on various Panama-related forums. I have listed ones that get good overall comments below. I don't recommend one over another.
FYI - Pty stands for Panama City. That "abbreviation" comes from the airport code for Panama City's Tocumen International Airport (PTY).
Not everyone has had good experiences using the US Postal Service to send letters and packages to Panama.
Packages. We have had a very good experience with packages sent by USPS. For years, my kids received regular birthday, Easter and Christmas packages from their grandparents here in Panama. Every package arrived, sooner or later. Sometimes even quickly (think 2 weeks).
Unfortunately, once a few postal workers in David rifled through and stole from all the packages waiting to be picked up at that post office. This meant that my youngest daughter did not get her grandmother's birthday gifts that year. Very disappointing for both parties.
I was pleasantly surprised that in response to this theft, the David post office fired a number of workers and completely changed their process for packages. I don't believe such a theft has happened again.
Magazines. We have not had much luck with magazines sent by US Postal Service though. Some arrive, and some don't. My husband a a newspaper delivered from Spain, and it almost never arrived. However, it "envelope" was a simple paper band around the paper, easily ripped and destroyed.
Letters. We have had pretty good track record getting letters from the US via the USPS. To increase your odds, it is best to sent it in one of those big cardboard priority mail envelopes. The size and visibility seems to give it less chance of getting lost.
What Address To Give USPS. As I mentioned in Mail in Panama - Part 2, the Panama mail service has no door-to-door mail delivery. You need to direct your package or mail to correctly to increase its chances of arriving as quickly as possible. Find out what address to use for mail in Panama.
There are other ways to get a letter sent or faxed to anywhere you desire. Here are some of your options.
DHL - The best way to get a time critical document to the USA (or anywhere) in Panama is by DHL. For some reason DHL is more reliable in Panama than FedEx is. It isn't cheap, but it is fast and reliable. There are DHL office in many locations throughout Panama.
If you go to the Boquete Tuesday market, there is a service there from which you can buy USA stamps. They forward the mail to the USA to be mailed. Not for use for urgent mail.
You can email your letter to an online mailing service. They print it out and mail it anywhere you want it to go in the world.
You can send it certified mail, over-night, and more.
The return address is the service's, so if something is returned they will follow up on the issue.
Here are 3 services that seem good. I'm sure more will pop up in a Google search
There are services that will fax for you as well. You email them your document, they print it and fax it.
I am sure there are other services as well, if your really need to fax. Do you really need to fax?
Moving to Panama? You may want to use our Move To Panama Checklist.
The most popular one is Uno Express.
To send mail - or anything - domestically, you have 6 options.
I am sure there are people and businesses that use Panama's domestic mail system. But as I said, no one I know does so.
If you have had experiences using Panama's domestic mail service, please share in the comments below.
For more about Mail in Panama, see all parts of this 4 part series:
Moving to Panama? You may want to use our Preparing To Move To Panama Checklist.
Some people strongly disagree with this, and say it is both slow and always completely unreliable.
But that has not been our experience. (I talk about some of our postal experiences below.)
This is part 2 in our series about Mail in Panama. Part 1 discusses your current mail & virtual mailboxes. Part 3 is on domestic mail, within Panama, and Part 4 talks about mail services to send items to and from Panama.
One important thing to know is that COTEL does not deliver door-to-door.
This means that:
Consequently, you should not use your home address as your mailing address when using COTEL. That assumes you even have an address for your home. Many residences are not part of any kind of address system in Panama.
Your electric and some other utility bills will be delivered to your home. However, it is the utility company that delivers these bills, not the postal service.
In my case, they slip the bill into our fence. If the delivery person sees you, he or she will give it to you directly. It is not a reliable system.
I have often found my electric bill months later buried in some leaves in a corner of my yard. You should just know when your bills are due and pay them in person, or online, when that option is available. (Find out more about paying your utility bills in Panama.)
To receive mail via COTEL you can either rent a post office box or have it sent to you General Delivery. Either way you will have to go to the post office to pick up your mail.
I have done both. Personally, I did not experience any better service using a PO Box than I did using General Delivery.
To rent a PO Box, you pay $20 ($15 if you are retired) a year.
The payment covers the rent from January to December. They do not pro-rate your payment. So if you are thinking of renting a box in November, you may want to wait until January. Otherwise you will pay $20 in November, and then $20 again in January.
If they have no available post office boxes, don't worry. As I said, we have had the same experience using General Delivery as with a PO Box.
Tell your family & friends to use this address to mail things to you.
Your name must be written the same way as it is on your ID. Some postal employees are sticklers about this. Some aren't, but better to be safe than sorry. The address should be in Spanish.
At the David Post Office, I have to go to 3 locations to pick up a package.
1) Inquire for your mail at a window in a line of windows on the exterior of the building. If you don't speak Spanish well, hand them your ID as you attempt to ask if you have mail. They will know what you want. If you have a letter, you sign for it, and you are on your way.
2) If you have a package, you must go into the building to see the customs person. For a package, the customs person will open and go through the package. They will only go through the package in your presence. They do this to determine if all the items can be legally sent to you as well as to assess a duty, if any. So far I have never been charged a duty or told that any of my items were not allowed.
3) Then you go back outside to another window to pay for the rent and any other fees or duties on the package. I always seem to have rent to pay on my packages. Yes, they charge a daily fee to store your package until you pick it up. (More on that below)
We have had a very good experience with packages sent by the US Post Office to Panama.
For years, my kids have received regular birthday, Easter and Christmas packages from their grandparents here in Panama. Every package arrived, sooner or later. Sometimes even quickly (think 2 weeks).
You can mail letters and packages to the USA and other places using the Panama postal service. It is slow. It can take 2 to 6 weeks for a letter to arrive in the US. And occasionally it will never arrive.
Some people say all the mail they have sent has arrived, eventually. Other haven't had that experience.
No one I know uses the Panama postal service to send mail to someone else in Panama. I have never even heard anyone suggest it. Delivery services are used.
The most popular delivery service is Uno Express, which has locations throughout Panama. Depending upon what you are sending and where, there are other options as well.
Click to discover your domestic mail options in Panama.
There are no zip codes in Panama. Some electronic forms have difficulties with this. They will not let you submit your address without a zip code. In that case, I put 5 zeros for the zip code. It has never failed me yet.
Rent & Custom Duty
Although, our packages are always addressed to us in Puerto Armuelles, Almost all of our packages are held in David for pick-up. (David is the biggest town in the Chiriqui Province, about 1 hour away from Puerto).
I think they keep them in David so they can make some money. As I mentioned, you actually pay rent each day your package is stored at the post office until you pick it up. It is not much per day, but still. The post office can also collect any duty imposed on your packages. They have only held up our packages in David, never letters.
30 Days of Storage Maximum. Technically, COTEL will store your package for 30 days only. After that they can return it to the sender. I have had packages waiting for us for a lot longer than 30 days. But once they did send a package back to the sender because I didn't pick it up in time. So I recommend you tell people not to send you surprise packages. You need to know to check for them. For awhile, there was a postal employee who would call me when I received a package. But he left, and I received no further notification calls.
Note: The Postal Service in Costa Rica tends to be more reliable than Panama's. For this reason, expats living near the border, sometimes rent a PO Box in Costa Rica. A word of warning though. The customs in Costa Rica is much stricter than in Panama. At least that has been our experience. We have never paid any custom duties for the many many packages of new items we have received here in Panama. But once my mom sent a box to the Costa Rica Post office at Pasa Canoas, and we paid a heavy custom duty on a box filled mostly with used clothes.
If you want to send and receive mail & packages in Panama, you may want to look into using a mail service such as Mailbox Express or Hot Express. You can find out more about your mail service options here.
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The short answer is that you are able to send and receive mail in Panama. But you must do it differently than "back home".
Instead of writing an incredibly long post about mail in Panama, I broke my answers into 4 parts. This post is Part 1, what to do about your current mail, Part 2 - Postal Service in Panama, Part 3 - Domestic Mail in Panama, and Part 4 - Best way to send & receive mail & packages.
Here I answer the first 2 questions
1) What to do with the mail you get now?
2) Can you get that mail sent to your home in Panama?
Right now you get mail delivered 6 days a week to your home. Most of it is junk, but you most likely want to continue to get some of it once you are in Panama.
Of course, you could just take a pass and leave all that mail behind. Let someone else recycle it. What a relief that would be, huh?
The problem is that every once in awhile you get something important in the mail. Something you want to read.
1) Go paperless as much as possible. This is easy to do for your credit card, bank statements, and even for your magazine subscriptions. Most businesses prefer to email you rather than use snail mail. They make it easy for you to go paperless. It save them money. And it saves trees.
2) Stop all junk and unwanted mail. The post office won't forward junk mail to your virtual mail box. But they will still forward you non-junk, but unwanted mail. Stopping junk and unwanted mail is not always easy.
I recommend you do 3 things to free up your mail box (virtual or not).
Actually you probably will want to do those 3 things whether you move to Panama or not.
Now how do you get your remaining mail sent down to Panama. Actually, it is best not to send it down. Do you really want to pay to ship your mail down without knowing if you want to read it or not? There are other ways to get your mail, without getting it physically delivered to you.
You can forward your mail to a friend or family member and have them deal with it. This may be the best route for you. But it does have some pitfalls.
We did this at first. We forwarded our mail to a dear friend. The issue was alot of the mail really wasn't dealt with, at least not the way we would have dealt with it.
If you decide to use a friend or family for your mail manager, you also have to be comfortable with them being privy to your personal and financial information. And maybe hearing their advice on how they think you should handle your affairs.
A better way, a way that will work, even when your sister is ill with the flu, is a virtual mail box.
This is the easiest & most affordable way to continue to get your mail "delivered" to you in Panama.
The service will give you an address in the USA, usually in Florida, sometimes in Texas. I had one who gave me an address in New York. Of course, there are also virtual mail box services in Canada and throughout Europe too.
Note: If you will be paying taxes in the US, and your only "residence" in the US will be your virtual mailbox you may want to make sure your virtual address is in Florida or Texas or another state that also does not have a state income tax.
Your Virtual Mailbox Service takes a photo of the envelope and posts it to your account. You review these on-line. If you want to see what is in the envelope, they will scan it for you. If you get a check, they will deposit it for you. If you get a package (or a letter you want a hard copy of), they will forward it to any service you also subscribe to (eg. Mailbox Express, Airbox Express), which will then deliver it to you in Panama. (See how to get packages delivered in Panama).
The service will give you instructions on how to set up your virtual mailbox. Basically, you will have to fill out a form authorizing them to collect your mail etc. You will also need to submit a forwarding address request to your home country's postal service. Also, don't forget to update your address with anyone who sends you wanted mail that you don't want to get electronically.
First, you need to determine what mail services you need.
Some items to consider whether you need, or not.
Pick the service that provides you the services you need at an affordable price. I would recommend doing a Google search for reviews of your top 3 picks. Maybe ask on various Panama forums. You want to use one that other people have been happy with.
We use one a very simple one, USA Mail1 They scan the envelopes and open them when we request them to. Simple. And only $10/mo.
Services usually charge a flat monthly fee. Typically they charge extras based on volume of mail, storage requirements, whether you need mail forwarding, etc.
In the list virtual mailbox companies below, I included the range of costs. As you will see, you can pay anywhere from $0 or $8 to $179/mo depending on the company and the services you want to have.
Be careful. The monthly fee usually covers a set number of letters/scans, and perhaps some basic mail forwarding service. Over this set amount you typically get charged a per letter fee. Some services charge a postage deposit, shipping fees, enrollment and cancellation fees as well.
There are a number of virtual mail box companies. A Google search will give you a list.
Make sure the one you chose provides all the services you desire at the price you want.
I have heard good things about Mail Box Forwarding. We use USA Mail1. I have no complaints about them, but we only use their most basic package.
There are many others, here is just a sampling.
In Canada:
In USA:
I am not recommending any service in particular. You should do your own research on them.
Moving to Panama? You may want to use our Moving To Panama Checklist.
