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Shipping Pets - a personal 'tail' (cont.)
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With barely two hours to go to my flight, and still no hope of the
cats leaving New Zealand, one of the representatives from Dogtainers
decided to pay a visit to the authorities personally to see if there
could be a work around. He ran outside to his van, threw it into
reverse, and slammed his van straight into the front of my car!
So not only was I flying out of New Zealand in two hours, I had
two cats getting grumpy sitting in their cage and I also had a car
accident to deal with – and most of my problems at that point
were at the hands of the people from Dogtainers. |
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In the end the duty manager
at MAF decided to allow the cats to travel as long as I was certain
the paperwork at the Swedish end had been sorted out. It had,
so I finally could go to the airport to say goodbye to friends
and family and the cats were being escorted airside onto the plane.
36 hours after waking up that morning to start my journey, the cats
and I arrived in Stockholm, Sweden. There are many, many paragraphs
to write about what happened that day but I’ll try to cut
a very long story short. Dogtainers had sent the cats as cargo,
not unaccompanied baggage. As a result the airport personnel couldn’t
locate the cats for over 1 hour. Dogtainers had also neglected to
ensure that a seal was put on the cage so, as the cats had transported
through Bangkok, the vet wouldn’t release them due to fears of disease.
It took many phone calls to New Zealand to reassure the vet that
the cats were free of disease, cost a lot of money taking taxi rides
to the cargo building to pick them up and clear them through customs
(paying additional cargo handling fees as well) and I subsequently
missed my connecting flight which I had to pay for again to get
the next flight (even though I’d allowed 6 hours between flights).
Oh, and the airline lost my luggage on the connecting flight!
The cats and I are now safely ensconced in Sweden and enjoying our
lives. I did try to get some sort of compensation from Dogtainers
in Auckland but they insist to this day that they did nothing wrong.
The moral of the story? Make sure that you know exactly what is
required in terms of the paperwork and your responsibilities –
and above all, use the services of a professional agent.
At the end of the day, you get what you pay for – and by trying
to save a few dollars we ended up paying a whole lot more.
My final comment – if you’re in Auckland and looking
to ship pets overseas, think very carefully about who you use. |
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