Month: March 2005

Avoid Animal Airlines!

Animal Airlines really seem to be a cowboy company and are really unorganised and I really recommend avoiding them.
I’d be intrigued to see if anyone has had any success with importing their cats to the states with them. We fly out on the 20th April (hooray!) and are having major hassles getting straight answers out of “animal airlines” who are meant to be the people to send the cats with.
We are flying continental from Manchester to Columbus Ohio and have been quoted £1500 for the three cats by continental who say we need to go via animal airlines. However animal airlines gave us a quote for £735 but when we tried to book it they then bumped the price up by £135 by saying we needed to have the cats sent to cincinatti (and we would have to pick them up from there – a 3 hours drive from Columbus). When we reluctantly decided to try that route, the price went up ANOTHER 3% as we wanted to pay by credit card – NOW they are saying that they could decide to use Continental and we might have to pay that – but they’d decide on the day – oh and we’d have to throw the cats out of the airplane window as they can’t be dropped off at the airport until an hour *after* our flight has left. The fact that a quote (which is meant to be legally binding) has increased in value by £135 is just not right and I wonder if trading standards would have something to say…….
This company seem to make the rules up as they go along and I just don’t trust them – but £1500 is VERY expensive for three cats and I’m not sure we can afford that with everything else we have to pay out in the first weeks of moving.
The whole experience is really frustrating. Kristen managed to speak to another company this afternoon who said that they had had a lot of people coming to them after getting the runaround from Animal Airlines and who had not been very happy with their service.
(Hopefully this rant will get a high rating in google as I couldn’t find much on them in google (which is a bad sign by itself))

Film developing.

I got a film camera at one of the caches I did this weekend so now I have to work out where to get the pictures developed. Previously I’ve used 24hour processing at the shops but I’m not too bothered about the response times for someone elses pictures. I’m also trying to work out whether to get a cd done at the same time (as ultimately the pictures will be posted online). Any suggestions on who to use or avoid?