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When that whole Covid thing startet DHL strongly recommended to go for Premium shipping for overseas locations. Say said because of the strongly reduced passenger flights they had lost freight capacity and if you didn't use premium service your parcels would take up to 40 (US) or 60 (Australia) days to be delivered. That upped the price from 20€ to 53€. And shipping could still take ages.

Recently I did an experiment. I sent two parcels to the same customer, one premium, one not. Guess what? They arrived simultaneously. I'm thinking DHL uses FUD to make you choose the more expensive service and therefor I will revert to standard shipping world wide, dropping rates back to 20€.

I understand your rate change, i do think that their sorting/logistic system is smart and focusses on costs; it knows that if two packages are close by they opt for speeding both up instead haveing to drive-out two times.

You can always revert back if it doesn't work.

In the last 3 months I have lost a total of 3 parcels and had to spend a lot of time to track down delayed ones. DHL has become really unreliable. I have tried to switch over to UPS but their website is so convoluted that I gave up.
Does anyone know a good world wide carrier that is easy to use and targeted at small scale businesses?

The company I used to work for had to send some brochures and catalogues to some customers in Sweden. Turned out it was cheaper to send me (from the UK) by plane, hire a car, pay petrol, meals, hotels etc than to send them by courier... Sorry, that probably doesn't help much

Had bad experiences with all the carriers to be honest, it seems to depend as much on the final driver of the van at the delivering end as it does on the rest of the company

Yes, but it must be something systematic as I never lost a parcel since 2013 and now 3 in 3 months. Ok, lets not count the one to the Ukraine, that is more than "systematic".

Issue with DHL is they hand over parcels to the local post with varying success whereas UPS/Fedex/... run the entire route themselves

Perhaps you could use a shipping broker if there are any in Germany? They have contracts with hauliers and when you order shipping they give you a list of prices from all the haulier services, you choose the one you like and they send you a shipping label, then a driver comes to collect your package. It is a simplified way of ordering too - you only enter your package dimensions and weight and fill customs form if you send outside EU. That way I use UPS without ever going to UPS website. Prices are better too because those brokers turn over a high volume of parcels.