Busiest Shipping Week Underway for UPS

ATLANTA, Dec. 15, 2009 – UPS (NYSE:UPS) now has entered the busiest “peak week” of the year, culminating next Monday (Dec. 21) with a Peak Day that will see more than 22 million packages delivered worldwide on that one day alone.

That’s more than 250 deliveries every second.

The nimbleness of the UPS global package delivery network enables the company to easily adapt to these annual spikes in package volume. Consider these facts and figures:

While Monday, Dec. 21, will be the busiest day for all package deliveries (ground and air combined), Wednesday, Dec. 23, will be the busiest day for UPS air express packages. UPS will deliver more than 6 million air packages on that day globally.

UPS expects online tracking requests to grow to more than 156 million during Peak Week, including 35 million on the busiest tracking day, Dec. 22.

UPS once again is one of the holiday season’s top employers of choice and is adding 50,000 seasonal employees around the U.S.

UPS’s ground fleet includes 95,000 package cars, vans and tractors globally.

Green isn’t just a holiday color at UPS, which is home to the transportation industry’s largest private fleet of alternative fuel vehicles. That fleet – with 1,700+ vehicles using compressed natural gas, liquefied natural gas, propane, fuel cell, electric and hybrid electric power – has collectively exceeded 144 million delivery miles since 2000.

UPS Airlines, one of the 10 largest in the world, is adding 37 chartered aircraft to its year-round operating fleet to handle the influx of holiday packages. During Peak Week 2009, 2,049 UPS cargo flights will take off daily. That’s about 330 more flights than a typical day in November.

Attention procrastinators: UPS will accept Next Day Air.