Shipping our Tiger to Europe proved to be quite simple and painless, just as we expected it to be. This is a very busy sea route, with lots of choices of shipping lines, shipping agents, ships and schedules. For many years, we had spoken to everyone we met who was traveling in a european RV whether in North America, Mexico or further south and asked them how they had shipped their vehicle. As a result, we had a good sense of which ports and shipping agents were most frequently utilized and therefore a sense of what we would likely end up doing ourselves. Factor in our experience shipping from South America back to the US just last year and we never had any worries about arranging passage to Europe.
Port of departure from the US:
There are several east coast ports to choose from when shipping across the Atlantic; Baltimore, Charleston and Jacksonville seem to be the most commonly used, along with Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada; several others are available as well. Europeans frequently use Halifax, particularly when arriving in North America, as the customs are said to be easier than at any of the US ports. If we ship back to NA after ending our time in Europe we will probably do the same. For this trip though, since we intended a shipping date in mid March, we had no interest in going north at that time of year and wanted to ship from a southern port, either Charleston or Jacksonville. It was ultimately an easy choice for us for two reasons. First, we knew and liked the port in Jacksonville, having shipped into that location from South America. Second, we have been in contact with some other American travelers who had quite a bit of difficulty going through Charleston on their way to Europe in 2009. Now, we can’t say that Charleston is always going to be a difficult port, but for us Jacksonville was a more comfortable choice.
Choice of shipping line and agent:
Having had a wonderful experience with K-Line coming home from SA last year, we naturally called them first, contacting by email the same person who had helped us last year. We had hopes that they would let us handle things ourselves as they had previously, but no, they said we had to use a shipping agent and recommended several to us. The use of an agent did not add significantly to the cost of the trip; the quotes we received ran between $200 and $350 for the agent’s fees on this crossing.
In the end, I don’t think the agent does anything that we couldn’t have done ourselves, but at least in this instance we had no option. One of the choices of agent provided to us by K-Line was Seabridge in Baltimore and we had spoken to many folks in the past who had used this company and they had been unfailingly satisfied with the service. I prepared an email request for rates and sent it off to four or five agents, including Seabridge. The replies varied slightly as to total cost, but not a lot, so we elected to go with Seabridge based on the recommendations we had from so many other travelers. One note on this company: if you do an online search you will find that there are two shipping agents called Seabridge. The one all the other travelers had used is the one based in Baltimore and that is who we used as well.
The two main shipping companies serving the North Atlantic routes seem to be Wallenius Willemsen and K-Line. WW uses Charleston as their southeast port while K-Line uses Jacksonville; thus our choice of port also governed our choice of line.
Port of arrival in Europe:
You can ship to many ports in Europe. Most people choose to ship in or out of ports in the north: Germany, Belgium, Holland, France or England. The common understanding is that there is much less chance of theft or damage from these ports as opposed to those in southern Europe. Obviously we can’t state this as fact, but based on conversations with numerous other travelers, this is the perception. We had very good reports from others on Zeebrugge, Belgium as being a smaller, easier port to arrive at than either Bremerhaven or Rotterdam, and this appealed to us. We had heard some reports of damage occurring at Le Havre in France and for various reasons felt that we wanted to ship onto the continent and not straight to England so Belgium it was.
Cost, schedule and time frame:
The cost of passage for our Tiger from Jacksonville to Zeebrugge was $2,340. This breaks down into $2,072 to cover the shipping, fuel surcharge, agent’s fees and port charges in Jacksonville, plus $268 for agent’s fees and port charges in Zeebrugge; larger vehicles will pay more, smaller ones less.
Sailing dates are plentiful on this route with two sailings a month from Jacksonville and up to ten a month from Charleston; I didn’t check departures from Baltimore. Our crossing from Jacksonville to Zeebrugge took sixteen days, plus we had to drop off the vehicle five days before the scheduled sailing date. As a result, we were without the use of the vehicle for a total of just over three weeks.
Specifics and Suggestions:
As noted above, our experience was very positive; everything went really well. The K-Line terminal at Jacksonville is low-key and friendly and sits right next to the outbound customs office. Dropping off the Tiger was very simple. At their suggestion we hid a key to the living quarters inside the driving compartment in a location the K-Line person knew. This was in case the customs people decided they wanted to look inside the coach. As it happened, this was not necessary, but as we were flying to Europe several days before the truck would actually go aboard ship we felt it was a wise precaution. We took care of everything and were gone in about 45 minutes.
We shipped with both fuel and propane tanks about half full and no one at the port asked about either one. This is a touchy issue as apparently different ports have different rules, or at least differing levels of enforcement, and US Customs can be extremely unpredictable.
Pick up in Zeebrugge was every bit as easy, other than some difficulty in finding the location of the office we needed to go to. Our shipping agent dropped the ball somewhat by not telling us that we would definitely have to go through a separate agent in Zeebrugge in order to pick up our vehicle. Had we known this we could have faxed documents in advance and might have been able to pick up the truck one day sooner than we did.
Links & Contact Information:
Shipping Agents in the US:
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•Seabridge: Helga Smith, helgas@seabrdge.com
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•Manaco Forwarding: Vanessa Aristud, manaco4@aol.com
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•Sims Waters: Myra Sims, myra@sims-waters.com
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•C Martin Taylor: Martin Taylor, cmtjax@aol.com
Agent in Zeebrugge:
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•Belinda Brouckxon, belinda.brouckxon@sdsbo.com
Links to other Americans who have also shipped to Europe:
