hamishcross

It really depends when you are flying, we were flying leading up to Christmas, October. I did a lot of research on the pricing. I just did a search on BA.com for a flight on the 6th of Feb, return flight was 1459 GBP, and the one way flight was 3769 GBP. Keep in mind with BA. You have to specify one way flight, you can't just search on a return flight and look at the pricing of the first leg. Also if you book through a big site, expedia etc, you are saving money with little/ no risk. The only down side is if you want to upgrade your seat to premium economy, they won't let you do this online if you booked through a 3rd party site. Anyway thats my 2 cents. I'll be interested to hear if you can book a 1 way flight for half a return flight direct with the carrier.

So the final update. We've arrived safe. Our shipping container arrived safe (groupage - John Masons) as well on the 19th of December. I think it left the UK on the 1st of November, about 4 weeks after our stuff was picked up from our place in London. There was a little breakage in our items, but nothing too major. One small picture frame, and one of my wife's large pots was deformed (made not round). Apart from that everything else arrived relatively unscathed. Customs marked the boxes they had inspected, they looked at my golf clubs, the bikes, the shoes (boxes) and the vacuum cleaner. Everything had been cleaned in advance, and the filters were removed from the vacuum, so no issues/delays/fines were incurred. The cat arrived on time, and safe to Australian customs, there are a lot of threads on this already, but PetAir UK were amazing, and it is probably some of the best money we spent in the moving process. The only other thing I would mention is, the price of things in Australia is astronomical. I'd recommend buying all your kitchen appliances/cookware/new lounge suite/linen/shoes/clothes/bikes etc before getting out here. Anyway if anyone needs any advice feel free to drop me a message and I'll try and assist where I can.

Thanks Bell. Hopefully it's somewhat helpful to someone. If not, the only thing lost is my time

we've got a house in Pascoe Vale South, so moving into that after 8 weeks in an apartment in Brunswick. St Kilda was unfortunately out of our price range for a purchase.

Awesome. Yours is probably filling the container. How many cu ft did they estimate? Where in Melbourne are you heading.

So we've arrived safe in Australia. The flight was via Singapore, we were on BA11 to Singapore and then JQ8 to Melbourne. The staff on the BA flight were particularly rude (rudest we've encountered thus far), and the JQ (Jetstar flight) was definitely quite budget. Meals, all drinks etc were pay for, and the seats on the plane were ryan air style, but it got us here safe. We had a 4 hour stop over in Singapore, where we tried unsuccessfully to get into the Qantas lounge, using a guest pass that I have from when I was a gold member. We eventually went to a cash entry lounge, where we had a shower and kicked back for a while. The free wifi in Singapore was cool for updating family on our progress. Anyway we arrived and went straight to Medicare in Broadmeadows, where we encountered and woman that seemed intent on not accepting any of my documentation, but I got there in the end. My wife's Medicare number will apparently be issued in a few days, apparently due to the amount of time it takes for her details from immigration to be added to the database Medicare can access. So that was pretty good. Next stop was the bank where we made some changes to my existing account details, updated PIN numbers etc. Definitely a lot more helpful than the UK banks. I suspect this is largely due to the lack of identity theft in Aus. Anyway, thought I'd update while things were fresh in my mind. Any questions, let me know.

People always want something for nothing. Had an update from JM today, groupage of our stuff went down from 581 Cu Ft, to 460 Cu Ft, so it was nice that they passed on the savings. That's the good news. The bad news is, the groupage is now looking like it will ship towards the end of October, not mid October as previously estimated. So if anyone wants to send groupage to Melbourne, send it with John Mason and it should fill our container and get it there quicker

Keep in mind, when people send you an email, like a chain email, and you send it on. There is a good chance your email address is in the body of the email. If these emails pass through a mail server that the spammers are monitoring, they will harvest your email address this way. Another good thing to do, if you use gmail, is when you subscribe to sites, put your email address, say it was pio[at]gmail.com, you can make it pio+amazon[@]gmail.com. Everything after the + will come to your email address. I did this with a golf club I signed up to, and saw later that they had sold my email address on to a golf marketing company. Quite annoying.

The reason you wouldn't see you were in the email is because they would have BCC"d you. This is blind carbon copy. Which means your email address doesn't actually appear in the To: or CC: but you still get the email. This is a common tactic employed by spammers. They work on ratio's of 1 in 1,000,000 (or greater) emails actually getting opened, and then maybe 1 in 50 of those, they actually might get something off. Luckily for them, it doesn't cost a thing to send emails. If it did, then these guys would be very broke.

So we took out our insurance with Letton, and John Mason's are here at the moment packing up our stuff. All very exciting. We spent the last week or so getting everything consolidated into a few rooms to make it easier for the guys to pack. So far so good. The guys are very friendly, getting about their business. John Mason's HQ thinks they will ship via groupage around mid October. So with any luck, we could potentially see our stuff around mid January, or if we're lucky maybe earlier. We took the advice of other posters, and kept out the kettle, tea and digestives for the guys. I know I'd appreciate it, so I assume they do to

Thanks Snifter. I'm across that bit of aqis luckily, I was just curious as to what other people have done. I need to return our 3 bottles today and get my deposit back

Awesome! Did you take your canisters with you (empty) or cash them in and just get your new bottles / refills in Aus? PS thanks for replying, gotta love PIO. Someone has done everything!

Hey Guys, We're moving along with our packing. Just wondering if anyone has moved a UK sodastream to Australia, and if the gas canisters are of the same shape/ thread etc. Sodastream.com.au told me that the Australian Sodastream business is a seperate arm, and they use different canisters, but I think they might be trying to make purchase another sodastream. Just wondering if anyone has had experience with this first hand Hamish

Ok I'll try that. thanks jj

I thought the same thing but the b.a woman had me wondering when she said they don't check them Ruthy