Pet Travel Blog

The variables involved in pet travel can be overwhelming at times. As a pet shipper you try as hard as you can to take care of all the details and think of everything possible to assure the shipment goes well for the client and their pet. On an international shipment for example, I can be communicating with several people: the client-who may not be in the United States, the client’s contact and/or family member in the U.S., the person who is transporting the pet {many times a breeder}, the vet, the USDA official vet, the consulate, and of course the airline/carrier. I always look at it as a team effort and anyone who has ever worked on a team knows that communication among team members is crucial to its success. Many times you are only as strong as your “weakest link” and you are “only as good as the information you receive”. Case in point: Recently I was shipping a puppy out of a city in the Mid-West to a city in Central America. We had to get the puppy an International Health Certificate from the qualified accredited vet, have it endorsed by the Official USDA Vet, and get it authenticated at the embassy of the country we were shipping to. The forms have to be completed in this order correctly and accomplished within 10 days of shipping. When shipping from the United States to many Central American countries, the airlines will not confirm space until 48 hours prior to departure. Timing is everything! We were able to get the documents for the puppy from the vet, get them endorsed with the USDA vet and sent to the consulate in Washington D.C. in a timely matter. The airline even gave me a firm confirmation 7 days before departure! The consulate decided to sit on the health certificate for a few days…a few days is not good; they finally authenticated them and I had a Federal Express driver pick up the documents and ship them priority to the breeder for shipping 1 day before the confirmed departure. The breeder was the ‘weak link’. He had an issue with the client hiring a ‘pet travel agent’ to ship their puppy; he felt like he knew how to ship puppies and this was money that should have been paid to him. Therefore he made EVERYTHING a problem and did his best to make my life as the pet travel agent pretty miserable for a few days. Complaints came because he did not know the exact time the Fed-Ex would arrive, and when he discovered that the airline would not let him tender the pet at the place and time I advised – remember – you are only as good as the information you receive-he went ballistic. I resolved the airline issue in less than 20 minutes but not before I got a pretty good tongue lashing from the breeder.

O.K., so the airline originally gave out incorrect information - it can happen-the consulate took their time in getting their part of the task accomplished and Federal Express will only give you a ‘window’ of time when deliveries are made….that’s the way it goes….whoever said that pet shipping and team work was a PERFECT SCIENCE?