[Graham]

The issue with GPS trackers is battery life. I was encouraged to get one for an elderly relative who occasionally got lost. Sounded good, until I asked how many months the battery lasted. The answer was about a day if constantly transmitting, up to a week on standby.

With a proxy parcel, you’d need a battery that lasted at least a week or two - perhaps only transmitting once a day - but that does rely on each host remembering to charge the battery fully before dispatch. I think the current missing parcel has been gone 3 weeks? So the battery of any cheap GPS tracker would have died already.

That's something I not even considered, however I had a look at one called Vodaphone Curve and that gives different settings for battery life.
a) 2hr update for 7 days battery life.
b) 30 mins update for 5 days battery life.
c) 5mins update for 3days battery life.
d) 3-5 mins update for 15 mins battery life.

So maybe this would be good enough for recharging at each host, with 1-2 day deliveries.

Even 2 hours update would be better than we get from the delivery service, and although it would not have helped that much with the current situation, it would perhaps have alerted me much earlier as to where the box had arrived at. As it was, we assumed that the parcel was on its way to us and then after the the 3rd day we had to start the treasure hunt to find out where it was. Even now we don't know for certain as yet that the parcel in the Lost Property Office is actually ours, as we only have the false MIC generated tracking documents to go by.