Re: Whats the cheapest way to ship household goods to the USA
 

I have been very bored between being stuck in Administrative Processing waiting for my passport to get stamped with a visa and not having anything to do at work!

I used Ozzidoc's wiki as a starting point and the two companies recommended on there seem to be very competitive - Fast Lane and Interparcel. I basically spent a whole day experimenting with different weights, volumes and number of boxes.

Based on door to door shipping from London to NYC, my huge spreadsheet shows that generally FedEx as the carrier is the cheapest option (Interparcel usually beating FastLane by about 10%).

The way to reduce shipping costs via airfreight is to make sure that no single box weighs more than 24kg (as close to 24kg per box as possible is cheaper) and pack stuff into as small a space as possible. The rates start going up if the volume of the box is more than 0.3 cubic metres (ie. more than 66cmx66cmx66cm or equivalent).

So for example if you wanted to ship your 30kg of books to NY from London then if you pack them in 2 boxes each weighing 15kg then total cost is about £83. If you pack it in 3 boxes each weighing 10kg then total cost is over £103.

Hope this bit of research helps.

Re: Whats the cheapest way to ship household goods to the USA
 

Welcome to BE!

And nice to see someone do a bit of wiki reading! :)

Good luck with the move :)

Re: Whats the cheapest way to ship household goods to the USA
 

Thanks Bob!

I have a strange situation at the US Embassy where they said they would approve me but i had a couple of bits missing ... read here

Anyway I am now stressing that I won't have my passport back in time for my anticipated final date in UK.

Although, Iceland Express has become my new saviour!! Their Flexfare is amazing (unltd free changes/cancellations to booking, free second checked bag and the cheapest single flight to NY!!)

Re: Whats the cheapest way to ship household goods to the USA
 

Welcome to BE and thanks for the research :)

Re: Whats the cheapest way to ship household goods to the USA
 

What about shipping some furniture, more than 'boxes' of books, who would you recommend?we had one company come round, said we could use a shared shipping container as don't have whole container load to ship. Said could take 6 months as They wait for other people who want to ship same location to share container with!
We live on isle of Wight, near Portsmouth or Southampton, is it possible to take our own stuff to the port, father in law is a lorry driver! Going to Asheville, NC.