Shipping gear to overseas destination

[karlo]

@Mattadvproject or anyone here with experience, have you ever shipped personal, used gear to Japan, or other country, to say a hotel or friend? If so, what do you do to ensure you don't get delayed in customs and end up paying import duty? I typically ship my gear to the hotel in Japan and never run into a problem, until last year. It got held by customs in Narita. I had to pay import duty to collect it, or wait until a weekday to process as unaccompanied baggage. In the shipping papers, I have always just declared personal ski gear and, mainly for insurance purposes, declared maybe 50% of replacement value. But, that still adds up to maybe $1000. Anything I can do to avoid this problem?

 

[coskigirl]

I can’t say for shipping gear but when my company ships items for demo/rental internationally it is critical that it is marked for “temporary export” so that customs knows it isn’t staying in country.

 

[Mattadvproject]

@Mattadvproject or anyone here with experience, have you ever shipped personal, used gear to Japan, or other country, to say a hotel or friend? If so, what do you do to ensure you don't get delayed in customs and end up paying import duty? I typically ship my gear to the hotel in Japan and never run into a problem, until last year. It got held by customs in Narita. I had to pay import duty to collect it, or wait until a weekday to process as unaccompanied baggage. In the shipping papers, I have always just declared personal ski gear and, mainly for insurance purposes, declared maybe 50% of replacement value. But, that still adds up to maybe $1000. Anything I can do to avoid this problem?

I've not had much experience with this. All of my guests are traveling with their own gear or maybe sometimes renting, so I've not had to have anything shipped. The only time I was ever involved in shipping gear from overseas was a bunch of second hand skis and avi gear from Melbourne to Gulmarg, India. It was an absolute nightmare. There is massive corruption in India in customs and DHL held up the shipment in customs until we basically paid a bribe for the shipment to be released. I had to go and personally check the goods and then someone else paid the bribe. That was a pain in the butt.

If I was shipping gear myself, then I would probably use a courier service like shipskis.com or someone else like that. Then at least it's all paid up front and I have someone there to assist me if something went wrong. I'm not much help, sorry for that.....