Pet travel

Nody wrote: »

I went through this type of issue before and ended up going to a professional import/export firm to handle it for me (but I was moving with 4 adult cats and hence a bigger problem in terms of the space etc.).

Would you mind sending me a PM with the name of the company you used, please? How did you find them, were they good? And did they bring your cats home, or did you have to collect them at the airport?

I'll look into those, thanks.

Just in case anyone was wondering, this is not for a holiday, I'm collecting the 10 y.o. cat of a person who can no longer look after him, and since he's had a rake of expensive health issues and he was first abandoned and then rehomed twice, leaving him with a rescue place again would be just too cruel. I mean, it's hard enough to get a healthy kitten adopted, it'd be impossible to rehome him. At least he knows me very well. But, to be clear, I'm not doing this lightheartedly. I only hope he'll survive the trip.

Update on this: Lufthansa have an embargo on bringing pets into Ireland, both in the cabin and in the hold. Obviously, it would've been too much to ask to have them mention it on their website... KLM allows them, but the carrier's dimensions for the cabin can't exceed 46x28x24, and the total weight can't be more than 8kg.

Just a few lines to report that Iberia were brilliant, everything went very smoothly with both the paperwork and the flight itself. The flight assistant very kindly brought me some water for the cat, too, during the flight.

The cat wasn't stressed - he was a bit nervous at first (different environments, sounds, smells, and carrier), and he meowed a couple of times when the noise of the plane got to a different pitch (literally, no more than a couple of times), but he slept through most of it, and was over all quite relaxed. I let him stretch his legs in the toilets at the airport, but he was absolutely grand. The carrier was excellent, it was waterproof but had some weaker spots at the seams, so beware, but the cat was very comfortable in it. It's advertised for a maximum weight of 5 kilos, but even though my cat was nearly 6 kilos, it was well able to handle the extra weight. If I ever need to get the cat to travel in it again, I'll bring a larger stash of puppy pads... I had to change them three times, but we had a long layover in Madrid, so that's understandable.

Hi Rosie, I had typed a long reply from my phone this morning, but when I went to post it all I was left with was a stupid URL...

Lufthansa, over the past 10 years, have grown worse and worse. They've a customer service that's so bad that make the old Ryanair one seem like top notch service. Rude, incompetent, and utterly unhelpful. When I booked with them I specifically mentioned pet travel and my route, and they said they wouldn't be able to check for availability without me booking first. Rubbish. Anyway, the first person I spoke to told me first that they were fully booked for pet travel, on all flights, for the entire week. Then I asked her to check other routes. Same reply. I told her it was impossible, unless there had been an invasion of pets in airports. Eventually, she told me that after speaking to a colleague she had discovered there was a clause in one of their documents (which wasn't available online, and which not everyone in LH was aware about) saying they had an embargo on pet travel to the UK because of Brexit. I lost the plot. I told her to check a map. She put me back on hold. 10 mins later she told me she found another document where it says the embargo covers Ireland, too. No explanation as to why. I tried to get a refund on my ticket (which I had booked in business class, and which was fully flexible, and I was told that before going ahead I'd have to agree to accept whatever refund LH would decide to give me, without knowing in advance what that amount was. Then I asked to move the flight to another date, and I was told it'd cost me €70 plus the difference in price. I told them to check the T&Cs on my ticket, before handing out incorrect information. Abysmally bad. I've been left stranded in Frankfurt at 11:30 at night because of a delayed flight with no LH staff at all around to whom I could ask for a voucher for a hotel, transport, etc. Nobody answered the customer service phone number, and I got no email regarding accommodation, or re-booking of my flight. There was someone else who was supposed to catch a connecting flight to Brazil that night but who had also missed the flight because of the delay, and that person had a dog with them.

Like I mentioned, I ended up flying with Iberia. They were all spectacularly good, and couldn't have been helpful if they had tried (bar one idiot at the boarding gate who took issue with my documents after they had been already checked and approved at the check-in desk, at a customer service desk, at two security points, and by airport security). I flew via Madrid to Dublin, because the connection via Barcelona was too short, but I was prepared to go to Santander (18 hours away from Ireland) and to take the ferry afterwards. That would have left me with the problem of dealing with a pet and public transport in Ireland, though.

Most pet removals companies seem to be ok at dealing with pets when you have direct travel, or outbound flights from Ireland, but if you have a connection to somewhere else, or are coming in from somewhere else, they won't consider it and they ask you to contact someone locally.

Canaries? Spain? Definitely Iberia, as airlines go!