Since we both felt that Fedex had done a bad job with such a delay, Cris proposed that we call Fedex to negotiate for a refund and I agreed, since they are charging USD$105 for priority package that took 12 days to reach, its definitely unacceptable. And as I understand from Cris, priority packages from Asia usually take only 2 to 3 days.
I then called Fedex and got them to open an 'inquiry'. The Fedex guy called me back an hour later and said that the delay was due to customs hold up. They would only issue refunds if the delay was due to their mistaken, eg. sending to a wrong address, or due to bad weather, etc. So we don't quality for refund claims. Fedex guy also said the Italy customs were suspecting the value of these watches were under declared so they wanted Cris to verify and asked for documents to be faxed to them. Cris told me he had to fax the documents 4 times, because they lost the documents the previous 3 times!
Anyway the package finally reached Cris and as expected, they had opened up the package to examine the contents. They removed the bubble wraps and took out the watches, but did not bothered to wrap it back, allowing the contents to bang against each other unprotected. Here are pictures Cris sent me. Very bad...
