Thinking of shipping your bike? Expect to pay more
 

I was just reading this article on the BBC website about the rise in the cost of shipping and thinking how it will impact overland travellers and our choices or even if it will put an end to some people's planned trips.
I like to take my own bike rather than buy or rent locally and have shipped it to the start of a trip or back from my final destination on several occasions, the last time being to North America with Air Canada a couple of years ago and the price seemed pretty reasonable then, although this article deals with container shipping I would be surprised if one does not affect the other.
The covid pandemic will have stopped or delayed many trips and there is often the option of buying locally which might prove more appealing in the future if these high prices continue, which I hope they do not.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57531716

Container shipping before the pandemic got ridiculously cheap because there was demand - so companies built giant new container ships - and then the supply exceeded demand. Now demand exceeds supply. The bottlenecks will clear, supply will increase, things will go back to more or less normal.

This is all also correlated with the border crossing issues that are stopping most people from travelling anyway.

Importing bikes into the uk from the EU has now got significantly more expensive, around 250€ in customs clearance charges and between 5and 20% VAT depending on the age of the bike.


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There's also a directionality issue here, especially with containers. Most goods are shipped from Asia to Europe and North America. At the moment, there's a significant lack of containers in Asia. At the same time, containers are getting stuck away from the ports in North America and Europe, as nobody is sending anything in the other direction.

This makes me think that shipping a bike to Asia should still be pretty cheap, as there is plenty of space on vessels going there, and plenty of available container space. Shipping it back, on the other hand, can get very expensive.

Canadian airlines have put 'bike transportation on hold for the time being ( hasn't covid got the blame for so many things, even inanimate objects seem to suffer!) so renting at sky high Euro prices is our ( I say "our" meaning people coming from America/Canada as l am English!) only choice!
If anyone wants to export a 'bike to Europe, just leave it in the street overnight & it will turn up in some ex-Eastern bloc country sooner or later!!!
(that was a joke & not a racial slur for the in-house woke brigade!) :oops2:

Air cargo prices can earliest drop when passengers operations start to pick up again. I think air cargo will cost us much more than ever before because we should not forget the global rise of e-commerce traffic and supply chains through covid.

Pandemic still drives air tarvel and cargo in a critical situation:
Airlines have to deal with perils from long parked planes. A lot of pilots are rusty due to less flight hours. The airlines discharged 4 engine big planes like Airbus A 380 and Boeing 747-8. New airplanes will drive higher costs. Business travels will boom before touristic travel. New flight routes have to be established on a new market because too many airlines went bankrupt.