askchapo

Having had some experience working in logistics in that time, I've realised that there are a huge amount of potential factors. It doesn't have as much to do with the origin/destination countries so much as where the origin/destination addresses are in relation to the respective points of entry/exit, as well as other circumstances that may be specific to that point of entry/exit.

Online shopping now represents the majority of retail trade so this will have a general impact, planes are costlier to fly than they used to be and the scheduling has never really recovered to pre-pandemic levels.

It also varies a lot by service. DHL for example flies their own planes, Mainfreight leases space on DHL flights (which DHL can decide to deprioritise at any time).

Auspost was corporatised in 1989 and we are still experiencing new flow-on impacts from that, e.g they mostly just fill up empty space on passenger flights to save money. With that comes high variance of actual shipment capacity compared to what was planned, and it's very normal for things to be delayed.

If you're a retailer sending high volume and it's important that your goods are received quickly, the shipping companies will work closely with you to establish fast lanes (e.g NZ to Perth in 1-2 biz days). Often the retailer will often subsidise their shipping options to be competitive. But the list of shippers that can afford this (and do the volume where it's warranted) is short.

You could probably ring the company and find out more details about the lane you're shipping on and strategies to reduce transit time, but if you're not sending big volume it'll most likely come down to shipping on a particular day of the week etc.

All that said, I remember ordering US to Australia 10 years ago and paying out the ass for economy shipping, it would take an actual month and was completely untracked.

Tl;dr it really just depends