Relocation shipping headaches

The challenges of moving during a pandemic are not limited to the actual quarantine. One of the surprising issues in our latest move has been actually receiving our household goods. If you haven’t moved in an expat move before the process usually goes something like this. 3-4 weeks before you leave you move into temporary accommodation. The packers come in and pack then move all of your goods, and you do ay repairs so you can move to your new location.

However at the moment many people don’t want to go into hotel locations with the need for meals out, especially in their locked down cities. Which leads to situations like ours, where people get a ‘post-pack’ and stay in their homes until the last date and then get packed afterwards. It’s slightly less smooth, but works OK if you have a trusted relocation person to supervise the move.

Then ideally you move to your new location and get 4 weeks short term accommodation and in the interim your goods arrive in port and you choose a new home. We chose to avoid short term accommodation at this end to smooth the transition for our kids but ran into a new covid problem ‘the shortage of shipping containers’.

The TL/DR version of the story is that during the coronavirus pandemic many western countries scaled down production, but stayed at home ordering items from Asia. The net effect is that a lot of empty containers are sitting in foreign ports from Asian exports and apparently that’s a huge problem in terms of getting our beds to us!

It’s very frustrating obviously and our rented beds, while fine for a few weeks, did not work for months on end. But in order to not break down, mid quarantine in Ontario, we simply decided to order new beds on Amazon. It’s surprisingly easy to get comfortable beds to the door and now I’m not waking with a cricked neck each morning it’s much easier to see the problem as a roadbump than a disaster.

My advice if you want to move this year – expect delays on your goods shipment and build it into any relocation package.

Want to know more about the shipping container shortage?

https://www.ship-technology.com/features/global-shipping-container-shortage-the-story-so-far/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-16/shortage-of-new-shipping-containers-adds-to-global-trade-turmoil