UKC

Hi there,

I'm moving from Manchester, UK to Seefeld, Austria at the end of August,
and I'd like to ask for transportation advice.

Does anybody know of an affordable Man&Van service or someone who does trips like that and would be willing to take some stuff for a fee? Or even a large volume courier?

So far I'm getting quotes of 400+ pounds, which is perhaps completely reasonable,
but not what I'm ready to spend.

I have roughly 10-12 70x40x35cm boxes.

If you could think of someone or something that might help - please drop me a line!

Almost forgot, if you'd like to personally help, perhaps we could trade favours?
Seefeld happens to be in a key location for summer/winter adventures, being able to crash there
for free because you did a favour to someone on the forum once might be quite cool (cough).

Cheers,
Milko

In reply to Milko:

I moved to the French alps about 4 years ago. Admittedly we had a lot more stuff but it costs '000s.

£400 sounds peanuts - half of that would be swallowed up in road tolls and petrol, not to mention the channel crossing.

In reply to yorkshireman: It cost me about that to move 7 miles up the road in London last summer, with about that many boxes and only a select amount of furniture after a major clearout. Sounds like a bargain!

In reply to Milko:

Cost me 350 to move a car from Edinburgh to London, and that was cheap. For someone to drive a van to Austria, and back, they'll be paying fuel, tolls and ferry crossing. Possibly the motorway vignette as well depending on where you go. 400 sounds very cheap. So cheap in fact that I'd be trying to work out what the catch was!

It's a 2000 mile round trip. In fuel alone at 40mpg that's over £250. Ferry maybe another £100 return for a van. Plus tolls and vignette. How much is the driver's time worth? Not much by the looks of it...

How about drive yourself out there?

Thanks for the heads up guys,
looks like I was completely crazy to think it could be cheaper!

On the bright side, I found this - parcel2go.com
They have multi-parcel service, for example 10 boxes, up to 20 kg with up to certain size.
The costs are a lot more manageable.

Luckily I have no furniture to worry about so it might just work out!

If anyone else has ideas/suggestions feel free to let me know.

Cheers,
Milko

In reply to Milko:

Interestingly I've just been quoted about £600 to have a similar amount moved from the UK to Toronto. I thought that was quite expensive... but now I suppose it isn't. The difference being that UK to Toronto is entirely by ship rather than road.

You can probably get it down to £150 with a door to door pallet service.

In reply to Milko:

As above look into pallet shipment. You can find a pallet lying around most warehouse backdoors, google pallet cling film to cover your boxes and attach them to the pallet. Should be a lot cheaper than individual boxes.

In reply to Milko:

I work in transport & just be aware that parcels and pallet services will generally chuck your stuff around on conveyor belts and in corners of warehouses. So you need to pack it well and be prepared in case you lose or damage some of it.

A pallet, that's a great idea! Thanks!

Cheapest I could find for 100x120x110 pallet+load size is about £130,
£160 with the insurance, which is perfect.
Multiple boxes offer is a touch cheaper so far,
but let's see if there are other advantages to the pallet option.

Stubbed, in your experience what's safer?
Would you ship a desktop computer that way or is it a no go?

If I keep the HDDs with me and ship only the hardware,
insurance is £35 for 3k...which would be plenty to recover a 2 years old workstation + some mountaineering gear.

In reply to Milko:

The only problem with a pallet is loading the lorry. You need to use a service that has a tailgate option to load the pallet. The other end is less of an issue as you could cut the shrinkwrap and lift off the boxes. I'd go with the pallet. Safer to ship, less likely to lose it.

In reply to Milko:


No, I wouldn't ship anything fragile or valuable this way unless I could get it in its original packaging which may well be built for parcel / pallet services. Furniture, yes. Make sure you are insured. These parcels will be loaded & unloaded several times before getting to Austria so a lot of opportunity to get 'lost' particularly if it looks valuable from the outside.