This was my first experience of international relocation. This is like moving house locally, but with a whole pile of added complications.
- it's more expensive (though not as expensive as I expected it to be)
- it takes longer - could be three months from Australia to the UK - which complicates planning
- we have to deal with customs
- packing needs to be more careful
We used CHESS Moving and shipped 37 cartons filling five cubic metres (which is exactly what I estimated back in December). With their simple insurance plan, the total cost was a bit over $2000.
The packers were pretty good, but I was glad I packed my books myself, as they didn't treat books with as much care as I did.
Note: Our shipment arrived safely on March 17th.
Did Camilla get a relocation allowance to offset the high cost?
She's only a post-doc research assistant, not a professor - no relocation allowance, anyway! But having spent $400 air-freighting 35kg of papers to the UK, $2000 for 5 cubic metres doesn't seem so bad.
But I should leave off judging the quality of service and cost until the shipment actually arrives! (Maersk's tracking service tells me the container with our consignment is due to arrive in the UK on March 2nd, so we could have it within a week or two.)