Can any of you help? We are shipping a 20ft container over to Toronto, and we obviously need to insure the Container we are being quoted an insurance amount of 3% of the value of the container, does this sound like the right amount...so if we value it at ﾃつ｣60,000 we will be paying ﾃつ｣1800 of insurance. Other question is do we value it in ﾃつ｣ or in $.

Did you take out the shippers insurance or go elsewhere? if you went elsewhere...who did you use?

Thanks for your help and suggestions

Jukie

this entire shipping insurance situation has irritated me somewhat.

i fail to understand how i am supposed to buy insurance for someone else's liability from incompetence. its not as though i can ask a tour operator to pay for my holiday insurance is it?

having read and re read and read once more the terms and conditions, i have decided not to pay out an insurance premium which is as much (if not more) of the actual shipping fees!

i resented the effort i felt compelled to go to, to devalue my possessions to make shipping affordable. i also took extreme dislike to the fine print which said, if one of a pair or a set is damaged / lost, then compensation to replace only that one unit would be paid.

i mean what use is one hockey skate / ski boot? loose one and both are rendered useless no? but they would pay out for just the equivalent of half the cost of a pair of skates (for eg)

and this is all after the assumption that you could force them to acknowledge their own personal liability, as opposed to their pinning the blame on any number of middlemen in the form of storage people, movers, shippers, drivers etc...... all of which are not individually liable either!

frankly, i was left concluding that insurance in shipping, is like the extended warranties in retail consumer markets; ie is the money making element of the business.

i mean how often do containers fall over board?

for me, valuables are hand luggage. PAIRS of skates and snowboard boots etc are going by plane with me. the masses of crap that i have amassed, which have no real monetary value but sentimental, can go on the boat with crossed fingers.

but that's just me.

good luck!

Thanks...I know I do feel like I am being fleeced at the moment I agree about putting valuables in our luggage...except two Jukeboxes and a Pinball machine may not leave much room for my warpaint I do think that we have to sit down and rework our values out as I think we are being overly protective of some items.......

Under the terms and conditions of shipment, the shippers are typically liable for a value per weight. For example, $40 per kilo.
You cant expect a shipping company to insure everything on board for the full replacement cost. A) it would be cost prohibitive, and B) how do they know what's on board?
It's not just shipping companies. Couriers work this way too.

Just to add, we didnt buy insurance either, but it's your own risk.
Only last week, there was someone on here whos container had been broken in to, their valuables stolen and everything else destroyed.
It's a risk you take.

I would try and negotiate the insurance.We got ours down from 3% to 2.5% and only insured stuff that was important to us.
Our container is in storage just now, which i think is an extra insurance premium.......which we declined.......time will tell if this was wise

Hi, we were quoted 3% of the total value of our stuff too, but we only insured the items that were expensive to replace, i.e suite, dining room furnature etc, brought the price down quite a bit.

admittedly, we are not burdened by big price items like furniture etc. most of our investment was in electronic goods over the years and they cannot go anyway!

i understand the liability limitation in the occurence of their incompetence and it being only ﾃつ｣40 per item (aka entire box); but i also understand that giving a stated value to each boxes perceived replacement value ('like for like' not 'for new') on the custom's inventory form, allows an expectation for more than this token sum.

in any event, we had toyed with insuring only a few things, but found we could just carry them with us. the rest is sentimental value....

incidentally..... anyone wanna buy a skoda?

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this is the third time I have tried to reply to this and it keeps disappearing! So going to keep it short and say I agree with you!