I own a lot of musical instruments, plus normal personal effects that I am going to have to ship when I move to NZ in about 4-5 months.
If anyone has suggestions about the best way to do this, I'd appreciate it.
I own a lot of musical instruments, plus normal personal effects that I am going to have to ship when I move to NZ in about 4-5 months.
If anyone has suggestions about the best way to do this, I'd appreciate it.
This is a really tough part. If anyone has any suggestions I'd appreciate it.
My wife is a professional cellist and (after much discussion) we shipped her cellos (and one violin, one guitar and one child's drum kit) in a container with our furniture etc from the UK to NZ.
The moving company built some crates for the cellos like the sort they transport antiquities/fine art in, the cellos were loaded into the crates in their hard cases and everything came out fine (cellos were still almost perfectly in tune indicating no significant bumps, etc).
This was moderately expensive but cheaper than extra aeroplane seats.
The shipping quotes we had seemed to be about 10% more expensive than others that have been mentioned on this forum, but we did have quite a lot of other personal effects (3 packers took 4 days to wrap/box everything).
The other instruments were less valuable/treasured and were just packed with other household items and were also fine.
The danger with this approach is complete loss of the container but the risk of losing a shipping container is significantly less than the quoted figures for accompanied air baggage losses.
Orchestras tend to have whole air cargo containers for their larger instruments (the ones that cant be taken on as hand baggage) but I suspect that this approach would be pricey.
May I ask what company you used, alldone?