The questions we are asked before the first booking.

Four things: what the cargo is (with weight and dimensions, or the container type), where it moves from and to, when it needs to ship, and the Incoterm if one has been agreed. With those we can come back with a routing and a firm quotation rather than a placeholder rate.

A door-to-door price has five parts: pickup and origin handling, export clearance, the freight leg itself, import clearance with duties and taxes, and final delivery. We quote them as separate lines so you can see what each stage costs and what changes if you shift an Incoterm or a routing.

Both. Smaller consignments move as LCL — sharing container space with other shippers — or as air freight when timing matters more than cost. We advise which one actually works out better once handling and transit are counted, because below a certain volume the answer is not obvious.

Mostly commercial cargo, but our packing, relocation and mobility service moves household goods and personal effects too — packed, documented and cleared under the customs rules that apply to personal shipments, which differ from commercial ones.

It depends on the lane and the routing, and we would rather quote a real transit than a brochure number. Direct sailings are faster; transhipment adds days but often costs less; air freight is days rather than weeks. Every quotation we issue states the expected transit for the routing it prices.

Yes, with the right preparation. Dangerous goods move under IATA and IMDG rules with proper classification, packing and declarations; perishables move in reefer containers or on temperature-managed air routings. Tell us at enquiry stage — both need arrangements made before booking, not after.

You have one accountable contact, and we update you at each milestone — booked, gated in, sailed or flown, arrived, cleared, delivered — rather than leaving you to decode a carrier portal. If something slips, you hear it from us first, with the revised plan.

The major gateways: Nhava Sheva (JNPT), Mundra, Chennai and Cochin on the ocean side, and the main air cargo hubs. Our offices in Cochin and Mumbai sit close to two of them; the rest we cover through our clearance network. The right gateway depends on your factory and your lane, and we route accordingly.

Export packing is not domestic packing done more carefully. It assumes weeks inside a steel box, humidity, and handling by people who have never seen your things: furniture blanket-wrapped and corner-protected, upholstery bagged, mirrors and glass cartoned between corrugated board, cartons labelled against a numbered inventory. Our crew does the packing rather than the customer, because owner-packed cartons are excluded from most cargo policies.

Anything rigid, brittle or genuinely irreplaceable — stone and glass table tops, large mirrors, framed art, chandeliers, sculpture, and machinery with delicate housings. Crates are built to the item on packing day, and where a timber crate is going to a country that enforces ISPM 15 it is heat-treated and stamped. Crating costs more than cartoning and less than the item.

Vehicles move, but they are a customs question before they are a freight question — several countries restrict the age, the emissions standard or the side the steering is on, and India’s own rules on bringing a vehicle back are strict. A car travels in a dedicated container or on a roll-on roll-off sailing, drained of fuel, with the registration in the owner’s name. Raise it at enquiry stage: whether the vehicle can be imported at all is worth knowing before the rest of the move is booked.

No. Live animals never travel in a cargo container; a pet moves separately under the airline’s live-animal rules and the destination’s quarantine requirements, booked with a specialist animal-transport agent. What we do is line the two timelines up so the household goods are not delivered into an empty flat weeks before or after the family lands. Start that arrangement early — the health paperwork for an animal takes longer than most people expect.

Three causes account for most of it: a sailing rolled because the vessel filled, congestion at a transhipment port that has nothing to do with either end of your journey, and an examination at destination customs. Weather is the fourth — the monsoon slows the road feed into the Indian ports, and winter does the same at the northern end. We cannot stop any of that. We can tell you the day we know, with a revised date and the options, instead of letting the original date quietly pass.

For household effects, a signed inventory that matches what is in the container, the transport document, and proof of who the goods belong to and on what basis they are entering. For commercial cargo, the invoice, packing list and whatever certificate the commodity attracts. Requirements differ by country and change without much notice, so we confirm the current list with the agent at the far end before the shipment sails rather than assuming last year’s answer still holds.

Yes, at either end of the journey. Origin storage is normal when a departure date moves; destination storage is normal when the shipment lands before the property is ready. Goods go into inventoried, sealed containers or racked units, billed by the month and usually with a minimum period, and what comes out is checked back against the list that went in.

The crew delivers into the rooms you point at rather than to the front door. Anything we dismantled is reassembled, beds go back together, and cartons are unpacked onto a flat surface if you have booked an unpacking service. Clearing the debris — flattened cartons, wrapping, crate timber — is usually a return visit a day or two later, because a full unpack fills a van.

We are a relocation partner, not an immigration adviser, so that question belongs with a qualified professional in the destination country. What we do is work backwards from the start date you give us, so the shipment arrives when you are ready to receive it, and supply the shipping documents — inventory, packing list, bill of lading or air waybill — that a customs office asks for when household goods are cleared under residence rules.