Any advice or information gratefully received about air freighting valuable items. We have a small box of items which the shippers said couldn't be insured in the container. They aren't fragile but they are heavy and we would rather not carry them as we only have a 20kg luggage limit.

Are there any specialist companies??

Thanks guys

I have a collection of guitars and other assorted instruments that I'm not happy to put in a container and I will be shipping air freight once I'm properly settled. My plan was to take advice from major auctioneers like http://www.bonhams.com/ and http://www.christies.com/ , split the shipment into several smaller ones (to spread the risk), use plenty of bubble wrap, silica gel and hope for the best!

I too would be grateful for anyone else’s thoughts and experiences.

MrX

Hi N!

We airfreighted 4 large boxes of stuff over so that we had home comforts asap. We were told to make boxes as heavy as possible to keep costs down. Use plenty of 'bubblewrap' to protect fragile items and you will be okay.

We shipped with Crown, and they gave us strong boxes, (free of charge to use for airfreight), and just used a local company to airfreight for us.

Hope this helps you!

M xxx

Any idea of costs please?
And what size boxes we talking about please?
Many thanks

jase

Thanks all.

I will be doing some research into this over the next week or so, so I will post any findings here.

We were already planning to airfrieght some stuff - mainly paperwork - as we are in the process of shutting our businesses down and and have to have the paperwork with us where ever we are. Maybe we could send it all together????

Does anyone know if they will delay airfreight for you as we will be spending a week in Hong Kong on the way...... (we like to make things complicated! LOL)

Do you have a family member who you can leave it with for the courier to pick it up? This is what we did as we were having 5 days in Singapore enroute. Saying that, we still don't have our stuff anyway and have been here 3 weeks now, going to Quarantine today for final clearing stage!

We don't really have anyone we could leave it with... can they just hold it until you collect it????

I had no idea it too so long to clear customs with airfreight!! Hope you get your stuff soon!

We send four tea chest size boxes out by excess baggage at heathrow airport i think it cost £314.00, then you have to pay customs and quarantine fees when they arrive in Australia. Everything arrived in one piece and it took about 2 weeks.

Thanks MarkMC.

It shouldn't take this long to be honest, we have the boxes now. Our courier company was pretty inefficient and didn't tell us the paperwork we needed and where our stuff was.

They don't sound too good, would you mind PMing me their name so I can avoid them???

I have found a very good company who will hold our stuff while we are on our stop over and will arrange for individual insurance for our valuables. We can take our boxes direct to them and watch them get palleted if we want to. Or they can be collected by a courier.

Here is a link;

http://www.independent-freight.com/

They were personally recommended by another migrant.