UPS predicts busy holiday season

This week, UPS announced its holiday season projections for package volumes, citing December 21 as the busiest day of the year

By Ellie Duncan | Thu Nov 19, 2009

The company has said it anticipates delivering approximately 22 million packages worldwide on December 21, 40 percent more than normal daily deliveries.

Over the entire holiday season, from Thanksgiving to Christmas, UPS expects to deliver about 400 million packages, a slight increase on 2008.

It will hire an additional 50,000 seasonal workers in this period in order to deal with the volume increase.

To ensure on-time delivery during the holiday rush, UPS Airlines will fly more than 330 additional flights per day during peak week, the four days leading up to Friday, December 25. The company's highest volume day for handling air express packages will be Wednesday, December 23, when it will deliver more than six million air packages.

However, procrastinators rely on UPS air services to ship as late as December 23, for delivery the next day.

Edited by Jennifer Denby

Source: http://www.pressroom.ups.com/media+kits/ups+delivers+the+holidays