Your full address including postcode;
Your phone number;
A photo of the front of your property or driveway entrance off the street;
Your “What Three Words” location which is accurate to three metres.
Despite all this their drivers used to claim “we can’t find you”… basically they were just relying on the post code alone (which takes you to the kid’s play park on the common behind our house), looking around, not seeing the house name and then bu%%ering off.
Fortunately they drivers have now got their act together and deliveries are reliable (best courier nowadays in fact).
Be careful using What Three Words in France. You have to make sure that the person you are sharing a location with has their app set to the same language as you. If you sent the location cat cheese tree it would not let them know where you are. Even if they tried chat fromage arbre it wouldn’t help. The three words for the square you are in are completely different in different languages.
That’s clearly true, but regardless of the language used by the app the location will still work e.g. if I set English as my main & only language but then use the French W3W address it still goes to the right place.
The multi language thing is one of the major att ractions of W3W. Even if you were a user of a very different language, say Hebrew, you can select English as the secondary language so when you select a location in Hebrew the English (or whatever secondary language you choose) version is also shown. All very handy for international rescue efforts
If you were a Japanese tourist lost in a forest in Germany you could still send your 3 word location (e.g. copy/paste via SMS) in Japanese to the local emergency services & they could still use that even if they don’t have Japanese language anywhere in their system.
Hi Stella. Hot off the press… The mairie eventually told us last year what our our new address would be. But said we would have to wait until spring 2026. That’s how it is out here.
Well, spring has sprung at last and just this morning we found, in the boîte, a letter confirming/proving our new address plus a smallish plaque with the number on (4 big digits, as we’re in the thousands for some reason.)
Our boîte already has our surname on it because La Poste stuck it on there a while ago. Now we have to find a way to glue or screw the plaque to the boîte. I guess we need to fix it onto the boîte. Drill a hole in it? Any idea what have others have done?. Plus, it’s just occurred to me that all our official documents are now out of date. But I think that doesn’t matter at the moment.
P.S. 2 more letters just arrived. Mine has the new address, OH’s has the old one… What fun.
How far up road you are in metres? That’s how they number houses around us. Very generious of them to give you numbers too, we had to buy our own (and our name plate)
I was quite chuffed with our number, 617, as in the squadron. Our gate plays the dambusters theme when anybody drives in (well it would if my wife let me ).
We had a number or an address, can’t remember, which automatically did all the official notifications.
Apart from a short period last year when the postman had instructions to send back all letters with the old address, including those he knew very well, I have since received many with the old address. I think they must have had too many complaints.
As far as the number was concerned, not only was it free but they came along and screwed it to the box without telling us. Only noticed the next time I went to it.
Daft system, this supposed X metres from the nearest junction, we are 100 metres away but our number is 75, our neighbour, the only other house on the road is 71, despite being 50 metres from us. Crazy.
The UK system is far superior. No. 1 is the nearest to the town centre and is on the left heading out, all odds are on that side and all the evens on the right. Much easier to find.
Except that having a house number is not mandatory - which IMHO it should be.
In posh UK villages like ours it’s all house names not numbers. And annoyingly people often ask for their house name to be blurred out on Google Street View (or sometimes the whole house!) so you can’t even find a place that way.
For example I had a photo shoot scheduled a couple of weeks go - all I had from the client was the house name and the road name - the road is a couple of miles long and is rural, so the house names are often on the house not by the roadside, or obscured by bushes, or the aforementioned Google blurring.
It doesn’t matter initially. The post office gives you leeway for quite some time. But there will come a time if you leave it (as we did) when they start sending stuff back. That can be an issue (as it was for us) when the bank thinks you’ve died!
Their app allows you to specify your What3Words location. You can also upload a photo of your house or driveway entrance. And a set of directions. And your phone number.
They still managed to get “lost” - the drivers didn’t bother to look at the supplied details, or didn’t have access to them.
