Even with the sharp decline in traditional mail in recent years, it seems that the management of international tourist mail continues to attract the interest of private postal operators in Spain.
Such is the case with LA POSTAL SPU, a company created in Madrid in July 2022 to engage in postal services. One year later, in July 2023, the company appeared as having registered in the Spanish General Register of companies providing postal services with a type B authorisation, allowing it to provide those postal services set out in the universal postal service, called Servicio Postal Universal (SPU) in Spain.
Following in the footsteps of other private postal operators in Spain, LA POSTAL SPU establishes agreements with -mainly- commercial tourist establishments such as souvenir shops selling postcards, so as to offer tourists the option of having their postacrds franked and posted at the shop itself.
The company supplies sheets of illustrated self-adhesive labels to be used for franking and a postbox, in the form of a personalised cardboard box for posting mail. The company’s sales representatives regularly visit the shops to restock with the self-adhesive labels and to collect the mail from the postboxes.
The size of LA POSTAL SPU label is 43 x 25 mm, includes a QR code directing one to the company’s website (lapostalspu.com), and a unique alphanumeric and vertical bar code at the label’s right edge. At the time of writing, the website is not active, and a historical query has yielded no results.
In April 2023, over the course of several days, we sent a number of postcards from Sevilla, using this company’s labels (for the moment we won’t call them stamps, as one will see below) and postboxes. The cards were addressed to various addresses in Spain, Europe and the United States.
Eight months later, NONE of the cards had reached their destination. We therefore do not know how/if the mail is managed, and what the company’s possible agreements are with domestic or international postal operators for mail remailing.
(To be continued)
LA POSTAL SPU is directly related to another private postal operator, TEATRO DE OPERACIONES BYPOST SL, a Correos consolidation company (see article, also published in VARIABLE 32). Both companies have the same headquarters and the same single administrator.
In our website www.ateeme.net you can find several articles and studies on other private postal operators and, in general, the remailing of tourist mail in Spain since the mid 1990’s.
(English edition rewritten by J. Gareze – December 2023)