UPS's (Atlanta) long-standing role as Santa's busiest helper will continue this holiday season with projected package volume swelling from roughly 15 million packages a day to more than 21 million on the busiest day.
On UPS's peak day, which will occur this year on December 20, UPS will deliver 240 packages every second through its worldwide ground and air network. Just two days later on December 22, UPS will handle its largest volume of air shipments for the year by delivering roughly 5.6 million packages. That amounts to more than double the normal average for air volume.
"These increases in daily package volume would overwhelm other networks,” said Kurt Kuehn, senior vice president of worldwide sales and marketing, “but UPS has the experience, technology and infrastructure to handle the surge with the highest levels of reliability."
This year, UPS and various retail analysts are predicting strong growth in the online shopping world along with solid gains in the brick-and-mortar arena. UPS enters the holiday peak—defined as the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas—as the primary shipper for 21 of the larger 25 e-retailers as ranked by Internet Retailer Magazine.
In the process of delivering all those holiday packages, UPS will apply its tracking technology to make it easy for customers to monitor the movement of their gifts. UPS expects more than 130 million online tracking requests during peak week and the daily total could exceed 25 million on peak day.
To accommodate the intense holiday surge, UPS once again will become one of the holiday season's top employers of choice, adding roughly 60,000 seasonal workers. In addition, UPS's ground delivery fleet of 91,700 package cars, vans and tractors will increase by more than 7,000 vehicles and the UPS Airlines, the world's eighth largest, will add 31 large jets for the period.
Source: UPS
