Making Eircodes Work for You: A Guide for Irish Delivery Teams
Eircodes have improved how we navigate addresses across Ireland — but they’re not the full solution, especially when it comes to deliveries. From mismatched entrances to hard-to-find drop-off points, we’ve seen it all.
When Ireland introduced the Eircode system in 2015, it was a game-changer for deliveries—finally, every home and business had a unique address. But while Eircodes have improved logistics, they’re far from perfect. For delivery teams working across Ireland’s rural backroads and rapidly growing urban estates, relying on Eircodes alone can still lead to missed drops, frustrated drivers, and unnecessary delays.
That’s where SmartRoutes comes in.
As an Irish-built route planning platform, SmartRoutes understands the limitations of Eircodes better than anyone. And more importantly, it’s built to work around them. In this post, we’ll explain how SmartRoutes helps delivery businesses get more value from Eircodes, reduce wasted time, and improve delivery experiences for their customers—no matter where they are.
The Eircode Problem: Why They Aren’t Always Enough
Eircodes were a necessary improvement, but they’re not flawless. Especially when your business is handling dozens (or hundreds) of deliveries per day, across all kinds of locations.
Here are some of the most common pain points:
- Rural confusion: A farmyards’s Eircode might drop a driver near the general area, but not the exact gate or delivery point—leading to delays or calls for directions.
- Estate lag: New housing developments can take months to appear in Google or Eircode databases, even after residents move in. We've seen this become even more prevalent as urban sprawl moves out towards commuter towns around our cities.
- Commercial mismatches: Warehouses, farmyards, or outbuildings often share Eircodes with nearby homes but sit hundreds of meters, if not a mile away from where the Eircode drops the pin.
- Driver fatigue: Relying on drivers to ‘figure it out’ wastes time and increases the chance of missed or late deliveries. Worse still, it can lead drivers to dead-ends with no ability to make a U-turn. We’ve all been there unfortunately!
How SmartRoutes Makes Eircodes Work Better
SmartRoutes is built in Ireland, for Irish delivery teams. That means we’ve engineered features specifically to overcome the quirks of our unique geography—and the limits of the Eircode system.
Here’s how we do it:
Geo-Location Enhancements
SmartRoutes enhances Eircode accuracy by using geolocation tagging. Drop points can be fine-tuned to the exact delivery location—whether that’s a loading bay, a farmyard gate, or a specific apartment block entrance. It’s part of broader address validation workflow that we have developed in-house with the Irish context at its core.
what3words Integration
Our integration with what3words lets drivers and planners assign ultra-specific three-word coordinates to any location, bypassing Eircode ambiguity. For those unfamiliar with what3words, it’s worth checking it out as it can be used for free by any business in the delivery game.
Reusable Location Data
Once a drop location has been refined by a driver or route planner, it’s stored for future use. That means you don’t have to fix the same Eircode problem twice. It also means that drivers covering routes, or new drivers don’t repeat the same mistakes going forward.
Irish Context, Built-In
Because we know how Irish infrastructure works—whether it’s narrow backroads, boreens or satellite towns—SmartRoutes routes vehicles more intelligently, based on real-world geography, not just database assumptions.
The example below shows how Eircodes can sometimes fall short for deliveries. In this case, the entrance for the home doesn't lead to the yard, and the two entrances are quite far apart. Because of this, using the Eircode alone caused a 10-minute delay.
Real-World Example: Agricultural Deliveries in Rural Ireland
One of the clearest illustrations of this in action comes from Grennans, a SmartRoutes customer in the agri-supplies industry.
Delivering farm essentials across rural Ireland, their drivers were frequently sent to vague or incorrect locations when relying on Eircodes alone. After switching to SmartRoutes, they were able to:
- Accurately mark drop points at remote yards and laneways
- Plan routes that reflected driver knowledge and terrain
- Cut time spent on phone calls from confused customers
- Improve delivery consistency and reliability
If SmartRoutes can streamline rural agri deliveries, it can handle just about anything.
Urban Headaches Solved: Staying Ahead of New Builds
Eircodes also sometimes fall short in urban areas. With new housing estates springing up around Ireland, many businesses find themselves delivering to addresses that don’t yet exist in digital databases.
SmartRoutes solves this with:
- Manual location tagging by drivers—adding new addresses before they appear on maps
- Cloud-based route updates, so the whole team sees the same, corrected delivery points
- Smart learning, where SmartRoutes remembers previous fixes and applies them automatically on future routes
The result? You don’t have to wait for Google or Eircode updates. You can keep your deliveries moving.
Built for Irish Delivery Businesses, by an Irish Team
What sets SmartRoutes apart isn’t just the tech—it’s the local insight.
We know:
- Why some roads in Ireland are marked as passable on Google Maps… when they really aren’t
- That a “shared Eircode” doesn’t mean a shared delivery location
- That delivery drivers are the best source of knowledge—so we build tools to capture and reuse it
And when you need support, you’re talking to someone who knows Irish logistics inside and out.
SmartRoutes Route Planning Software
Streamline your entire delivery process, all from one platform
The Results That Matter to Your Business
Switching to SmartRoutes doesn’t just fix Eircode problems—it delivers meaningful business benefits:
- Save time planning routes and fixing driver mistakes
- Reduce customer complaints due to missed or delayed deliveries
- Scale your delivery volume without increasing management workload
- Train new drivers faster, and permanently retain driver knowledge using verified delivery locations
- Improve your customers delivery experience, and your delivery reputation, helping retain and grow your customer base
Try SmartRoutes Free — and See the Difference for Yourself
If you’re managing a delivery operation in Ireland and relying on Eircodes, SmartRoutes is the easiest way to make your routes smarter, faster, and more profitable.
Our platform is simple to use, supports fast onboarding, and is backed by a local team that understands your delivery world.
Start your free trial today and see how SmartRoutes transforms your delivery routing — no guesswork, no hassle.
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Michael Santry
