Hi,

Everything seems to be progressing well with our move (well apart from not being able to sell the house and the other half not having a job!) but we have our LMO and are scheduled to fly over on 2 November to Calgary.

We are currently having a number of quotes from different removal firms and I have spent hours trawling through all previous posts regarding different firms but as seems to be the overall summary it is a bit of a lottery!

We have had three firms quote - Pickfords, Robinsons and Anglo Pacific. Robinsons has come out the cheapest by a long way (with the cubic feet and amount of time required to pack being very similar for all three). However, the differences I have had in terms of time taken to ship goods over their is considerable. Both Pickfords and Anglo Pacific have said to allow 5 to 7 weeks whereas Robinsons seem to think a maximum of 4 weeks should be fine.

In my specific circumstances we are actually going to be on vacation from 12 December to 6 January (I know - we'll barely have time to settle in but arrangements were made 10 months ago!) and as I understand it it is important that we are in the country to enable our goods to clear customs in Calgary.

We are happy to ship our goods over well before we leave the UK if necessary to allow more time for them to get over their before our vacation (as I know that no company will guarantee this) but I have two real questions here:

- Anyone have any experience of shipping times to Calgary or reliability of any of the 3 firms in terms of delivery (I've seen a couple of negative points on Robinsons in this regard on previous posts)?
- Any one have any experience of not being around when their goods arrived at customs and what the costs are likely to be if this happens?

I just know with our luck we'll get them shipped three weeks before we leave the UK (giving 9 clear weeks before we go on vacation) only for them to arrive at customs the day after we go on holiday and we'd end up paying for 3 weeks storage in a bonded warehouse!

Any help much appreciated!

Thanks

Rob

I can't remember the exact circumstances but we paid approx GBP 3,500 to ship a 20' container over to Calgary. It took about 4 weeks.

But, once it had arrived, our agents here in Calgary (Tippet Richardson) sent us the forms to take round to customs. I did that the next day, a Friday morning (it was a public holiday). Customs didn't actually clear the container until the Monday, and I got whacked with a bill for $385 for storage for the period between the forms being submitted and the container being cleared.

Hi Rob,

It was Robinsons for us (and their partner, AMJ Campbell, at this end) to ship a 20ft container from St Albans, Herts to Calgary. It left our house in St Albans on October 3rd, 2007 and arrived in Calgary on approximately November 2nd - so a month.

We were here when our belongings arrived BUT our house wasn't in that the purchase had not completed. We had to pay for maybe 13 days of storage and it was $467. Part of this (they argued) was because they had to unpack the container into the storage and then repeat the exercise to get it from storage to the delivery truck. They claimed it would cost us much more to leave the belongings in the container (which is what we asked them to do - as we felt that moving things any more than necessary would increase the risk of breakages).

This probably reads as anti-Robinsons but isn't meant to - just a statement of facts. They were OK...not brilliant...not terrible.

Most importantly, best wishes with the move over. Hope it goes great.

Kind regards,

Eamonn & Janet.