Both our cats are coming with us to Korea. Rather, I’m shipping them from the US, my husband will receive them in Korea.
We went through an IPATA certified shipper. http://www.ipata.com/ We went with Air Animal Inc. I’ll give them a more thorough review after our cats get to Korea. http://www.airanimal.com/ Before I hired them though I looked into what would be required to get our cats out of the US and into Korea. Korea’s requirements aren’t that bad.
1. Need to have a rabies vaccination < 1year but more then 30 days. If less than 30 days, then they have to sit in quarantine until the 30 day mark is reached.
2. Need to have a Health Certificate by a certified veterinarian (this means the USDA certified vet for your state…. Which means you’ll have to send off for the certification, the USDA has its own rules and regs and it’s a lot harder getting a straight answer from them)
An IPATA shipper, depending on how much you’re willing to pay them, will sort out all this paperwork for you. Pick your pets up at your front door, provide appropriate kennels and supplies, they will transfer your pet (make sure they don’t get lost at an airport), get them through customs, and deliver them to your door at the end.
Because I had so much trouble finding out costs before I did this, I’m going to provide our breakdown here for anyone who might be using this as a reference for their own move. And let me just say, Thank God Shannon’s company is paying for this.
$350 Residential pickup/airport delivery
$403 International health certificates with USDA endorsements
$500 Domestic Cargo
$350 Airline Transfer
$950 International Cargo with Insurance
$1200 Customs clearance, duties fees, and residential delivery
$945 Pet Move Management Fee
_____
$4698 Total
I probably could have done this for cheaper (they call this the VIP treatment). It was worth it to me to have them take care of everything so I wouldn’t have to stress out about this. A month on my own trying to figure out from the USDA certified vet what we needed to do (they gave me 10 year old documents about what’s required by Korea and then contradicted that information on the next page, not to mention pricing charts that had farm animal information instead of pet information) convinced me that it was worth any price to have someone else figure it all out and get my pets safely to me. Also, they’ll have someone who speaks Korean escorting our cats through clearance at the end. (That’s why customs clearance is so expensive!)
My experience thus far is I would recommend this route to anyone who can take it. I’ll let you know if I still feel that way in April.
