I like any stuff from Scotland to come Royal Mail, it's less expensive, and I've never had any problems with that method.

I find it interesting (but typical) that no matter which carrier is mentioned, there is a horror story. At my work at one of Houston's largest motorcycle dealers, we recieve on average, 25 to 80 packages per day either though UPS or Fed Ex. and yes with that volume, mistakes happen, but I must say fairly rarely. Honda uses Fed Ex only, most other venders use UPS. Of the dozen or so venders we deal with on a regular basis, it's interesting that none use DHL.

For years, we used UPS to ship out stuff, but we had issues with costs of supplies, pick-up times etc... So about 4 years ago we got good offer from DHL, and switched to them for outgoing. It went pretty great for a year or so, but then we started getting a lot of calls from irate customers that their stuff was late or undelivered for some reason. It happened to me when I shipped something to USA Kilts! My shipping guy would spend a lot of time on the phone chasing down peoples packages.

It seems DHL was doing OK in urban areas, but not so good out in 'the country'. Well tried to work with this for months, but we got a lot of customers out in the counrty, and some of them threatened to bail if we kept shipping their stuff DHL, so we switched back to UPS, and it's been pretty smooth since.