A Friendly International Gesture Lost en Route

I’ve seldom received so detailed or well-written a complaint, or one, for that matter, that was so undemanding of aid from The Times:

“Mr. Reich, I am sorry to bother you with my story,” wrote Sharon Kyomen, a Los Angeles dentist. “I feel embarrassed crying to you about this, but I am at my wit’s end, and just the act of writing you is making me feel a little better already! If you’re uninterested, or too busy to read any of this, it’s OK, of course.”

But Kyomen’s story was compelling. Her account of the misadventures she had trying to send a 14-pound package, insured for $683, to Peru seems to have wide applicability for the growing number of us with friends and relatives living in other countries. How many of us have had frustrations mailing items to them abroad?

Kyomen and her husband, also a dentist, had been treated kindly at a Lima dental conference by a Peruvian doctor, and she wanted to surprise him with a present.

She assembled quite a few things in a package measuring 12 inches by 12 inches by 18 inches, including a jacket, a shirt, a ceramic plate, facial soap, photographs, dried pasta, packaged seasonings, canned tomato paste and Paraposts, which are stainless steel wires that are cemented into teeth to hold dental fillings in place.

Maybe, as she concedes now, Kyomen should have been dissuaded from sending the package at all by the U.S. Postal Service, which refused to provide insurance, because it said the risk of theft was too high.

The post office recommended that she try a service such as DHL Worldwide Express, and DHL was ready to make the shipment, for $228.90 (although $248.90 was billed to her credit card). It advised only that she mark the package: PERSONAL EFFECTS/NO COMMERCIAL VALUE/NOT FOR RESALE. DHL sold her insurance for 70 cents for each $100 of the $683 value, and she was given a confirmation number and told it would arrive in two days.

“Although the overall shipping costs were more than I had originally anticipated spending, I was very pleased to find a service that would take care of it for me, door to door! Or so I thought,” she recalls.

It was picked up last June 21, and soon the troubles began. She was informed by DHL that the package had been held in Peruvian Customs and that the recipient had to submit documents on what was in it and how much each item had cost.

It was embarrassing, Kyomen said, to tell the doctor the precise value of everything. And it was exasperating when he had to submit the same documents to the authorities three times before he finally was informed he would be charged $300 in duty to collect them. There also was a question of medical certification for the Paraposts.

Kyomen tried to arrange to pay the duty herself. She had already contacted a DHL customer service rep in Tempe, Ariz., who identified herself only as Bonnie, to help her, and numerous messages went back and forth to DHL’s Lima office.

But the package at some point disappeared, and by the time Kyomen made a written claim for either it or the insurance on Nov. 4, Bonnie seemed to have lost interest in pursuing the matter. Kyomen said Bonnie was more and more difficult to reach, and finally told her, with resignation, that she would simply do “whatever she could,” which did not seem to be much.

After she sent in her claim, Kyomen began trying to see how it was proceeding in a series of phone calls to a man she knew only as Assanka in DHL’s Hawthorne office. Even when he referred the matter to his supervisor, there was no progress.

When Kyomen wrote me, Feb. 16, she lamented that “DHL’s ‘inquiries’ and ‘investigations’ never amounted to anything, and they’ve been exceedingly successful at stretching the matter out without paying me a cent” of insurance.

I contacted DHL spokesman David Fonkalsrud at the company’s Redwood City headquarters and asked him to look into the matter.

We first spoke March 1. Two days later, Friday, March 3, Kyomen received a letter from DHL, including a check for $683, the insured value, and telling her the shipping charges would also be refunded. The letter and the check were dated three days before, Feb. 29, one day before I brought the matter to Fonkalsrud’s attention.

The letter, signed by Lisa Hartshorn of cargo claims, said the payments were being made “as a full and final settlement and is a compromise of a dispute claim. This should not be deemed as an admission of liability [by] DHL.”

Kyomen was puzzled about the reference to a compromise. She said she had never claimed more than the insurance and shipping charges, or return of the parcel, or its delivery.

Fonkalsrud told me Monday, “Our records show the shipment arrived in Peru on June 26. . . . What’s unclear is whether the shipment was lost by us or by customs. . . .

“DHL’s [Lima office] turned clearance paperwork on the shipment over to the recipient, and then it appears the recipient was unfamiliar with the process, and he came to us for help. At that point, the shipment was lost.”

“It’s DHL’s responsibility regardless who had custody,” he added, “and the insurance would apply.”

Fonkalsrud also revealed that when Kyomen sent in her claim Nov. 4, DHL had lost that as well.

“But it resurfaced several months later, on Feb. 10, and then, [Feb. 29] the claim was paid,” he said. “My sense of this is, it’s not normal, a misplaced shipment as well as misplaced paperwork. So it seems it was an unusual case.”

Fonkalsrud said that, with DHL and its competitors, FedEx and UPS, “from time to time, shipments slip through the cracks” but such cases are “few and far between.”

Kyomen, though, said that in her discussions during three months with Assanka in DHL’s Hawthorne office, he had never referred to her claim as being lost.

I called Assanka to try to clear up the point. But when I asked him about it, a supervisor intervened and said it was company policy that only Fonkalsrud speaks for DHL.

Also, I tried to reach Bonnie. But she was said to be on vacation.

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Ken Reich can be contacted with your accounts of true consumer adventure at (213) 237-7060 or by e-mail at ken.reich@latimes.com