There is only so much space to cram your whole life into one suitcase.

Last year, when I decided to relocate, I had a measely 20kg allowance that came with my cheap one way plane ticket.

That’s what I get for flying economy.

At that point, I realized that I had to either get rid of everything. It was either that, or to hawk some stuff on eBay/Gumtree, and ship the rest home.

4 Problems with shipping stuff home

Problem #1: I was in the UK. Home was in Hong Kong.

Problem #2: Shipping internationally looked expensive and untrustworthy.

Problem #3: I had my own luggage to ship.

Problem #4: Most companies gave rough estimates.

So to resolve the issues above, I needed to find a reliable service. I started by comparing Royal Mail, Parcel Force, DHL, Fed-Ex, amongst other shipping companies listed in the yellow pages. Most of these services quoted upwards of £150 for a 10 kg box. Before VAT. Shippers mostly offered an estimate quote, and had crappy websites lacking a useful interface.

I like transparency, so they had to go.

Voovit

I got pretty close to donating my photo album to the grinders. One day, by chance I discovered a forum thread discussing removal services. A couple of people mentioned a company called Voovit (www.voovit.com). The name sounded like a web 2.0 biz. I got curious.

It turns out that Voovit specialises in international shipping from the UK. They also provided their own special boxes that are twice as thick as standard storage cardboards.

Best of all, they could ship my own luggage for a small extra fee.

After exploring their website, I got a specific quote. The total would only be £240 for 5 boxes. £20 would be a refundable deposit.

There are a couple of restrictions, none of which affected me, but worth noting anyway:

1. You do your own packing: Voovit does pretty much everything else, but you do need to pack. They give very good guidelines on how to pack safely.

2. Total dimensions of goods must be under 300 cm after adding the length + 2x height + 2x width. But the average suitcase size is way under this.

3. Shipping gets to your local depot. You have some local fees to pay (should there be custom, handling etc.). If you want to save money you can pick this up from them, or you can pay a little extra to have it shipped to your door.

None ofI these were issues for me. I wanted to pack myself, my largest suitcase was within the dimensions (and it was a large suitcase). Hong Kong was a small place, and the depot charges were all very reasonable (no more than £100 including delivery to my door).

Process

After filling in the simple online form, I got a few emails from their ops team, giving me step by step instructions.

Within 24 hours, Voovit boxes arrived at my door.

We had a special request asking for their drivers to call when outside because our doorbell was not working at the time (a trade off for the cheap rent). We were told to put a note on the front door. The boxes were delivered successfully. The boxes even came with a roll of their own tape, which I thought was a nice touch.

Do note: calling their ops used to cost 50p a minute on a 0900 number. But email correspondence is more than efficient. I never required the phone.

*Update: Since my shipment, Voovit now has a low cost VOIP number. The details are in the registration/quotation email, so people who register don’t have to use the helpline if they don’t want to.

Packing

Creating the packing list was easy: we just logged into to the Voovit member’s area and provided a general item count in each box with the total value. e.g. 15 shirts worth £250, my hair gel worth £0.50, the photos worth priceless etc. The list was probably designed just to make sure you aren’t smuggling drugs.

Payment was easy. Paid by card. The deposit of £20 was deducted from my final total.

Now I just had to wait for arrival.

Arrival

I was traveling through Asia for the next 2-3 months, so I completely forgot about it. About 2 months later, I got an email stating that my stuff was now at the Hong Kong international terminal port.

The depot charged around £100 including all terminal/tax/custom fees and delivery. A few days later, they delivered it right to my house. Everything was there! I will however say to be careful with packing. A few fragile items were damaged. The shippers must have thrown the boxes around.

To be fair to Voovit though, they did arrange everything smoothly, and gave detailed instructions with the packing.  I should have just packed more carefully, but I was in a rush leaving. Having all my memorable stuff safely back home though is, well, priceless.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I am very impressed with the service. They don’t ship to every country though so check their website. If they do ship to your country you can get your own quote through their website.

If you have any experiences with Voovit or experiences with international shipping, please post in the comments below.

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