How to move pets to Europe

Man, I sure wish someone had already written this blog post before we were getting ready to move. Figuring out how to get Sam and Trevor to Switzerland with us has been the most complicated, red-tape covered process of the whole move. There really isn’t a clear, centralized source of information for how to make it happen yourself; there are companies out there who specialize in pet relocation, but it’s stinking expensive, and we just couldn’t justify spending the money. Lucky for y’all, we figured it out for you; here are step-by-step directions to get your dogs and cats to Switzerland.[1] (Sidenote: If you don’t need to know how to move pets to Europe, I imagine this post is pretty boring and way too long; sorry about that.)

Step 1: Book their flights.

As soon as you know when you want to go, book the flights for the animals. If they’re lap dogs, they can likely ride in the cabin with you, which is so very simple. Big dogs like ours are more complicated.

The way I saw it, we had two options: get them certified as emotional support animals so they can ride in the cabin with us, or book them as cargo. Andy eventually talked me out of the first option, for a couple reasons:

1. It would be dishonest; no, I technically do not need my dog with me at all times for emotional stability. Rather, Sam needs me with him at all times for his own emotional well-being, does that count? Andy said no. However, I did plenty of research on how to get them certified for this – since we didn’t go through with it, I won’t go into detail, but it’s definitely possible…and you certainly wouldn’t get any judgment from me if you decide to do it.
2. Our dogs are the two most socially inappropriate animals on the planet, and getting them through an international airport would be an absolute circus.  Trevor doesn’t like other dogs; I think it’s because he thinks he’s a human, and he gets confused when he sees a creature at his own eye-level. Sam still hasn’t figured out how a leash works.

So, we decided to book them as cargo.

Step 1a: Pick an airline.

I did a lot of research on this as well, and we eventually settled on United. My main criterion was that the hold where they put the kennels was temperature-controlled and pressurized, and there really aren’t a ton of international airlines out there who make it clear that they offer that. Swiss Air was my first choice, because I think their service (like, for humans) is better; however, they only have room for one dog per flight.

We booked the flight for the dogs BEFORE booking our own tickets – there are a lot more seats for humans than dogs. (FYI, I got the impression that you don’t necessarily have to be on the same flight as your dog, but I can’t imagine why you would want to do that.)

United’s PetSafe program made me feel good about the process; they have a 24-hour contact desk just for traveling-pet related questions, so there’s no confusion about who to call. I talked to 3 different people throughout the process, and they all seemed competent and to know what they were talking about.

They will give you a quote when you book it, but you don’t pay until you drop the dog off on the day of travel; be prepared to pay a small fortune. In the interest of full disclosure, here’s what we were quoted:

1. Houston to Newark – Approximately $850 for both dogs.
2. Newark to Geneva – Approximately $2500 for both dogs.

A the time of booking, they need to know their weight, age, and breed, as well as the size of the kennel the dog will be in, so:

Step 1b: If you don’t already have one, buy a kennel.

The kennel has to meet the following requirements:

1. Have ventilation on all four sides.
2. Be made of a hard material (wood or plastic).
3. Be held together with metal nuts and bolts; if they’re plastic, you’ll need to replace them with metal ones.
4. Size requirements:

a. From United - Be tall enough that the dog has a 3 inch clearance between the top of its head and the roof of the kennel.

b. From EU flight regulations – Be large enough that the dog can stand up and turn around in it without trouble.

We decided to get this kind:

http://www.petsmart.com/supplies-training/kennels/petmate-plastic-carriers-zid36-6588/cat-36-catid-100105?var_id=36-6588&_t=pfm%3Dend_cap%26pfmvalue%3DBEST%2520SELLERS

If your dog isn’t used to a kennel, start getting them used to it early. If they’re comfortable in the kennel, hopefully they won’t freak out as much when they have to be in it for an extended period of time. We put Sam and Trevor’s beds in the bottom part of the kennel (without the roof) starting about a month before our flights so they could start sleeping in it, and then put the roofs on about 2 weeks before.

Step 3: Microchip.

It’s required in pretty much all European countries, and it has to be a 15-digit, ISO microchip. Our vet used HomeAgain, which meets this requirement.

NOTE: The microchip has to be implanted before vaccinations are given.  For example, if your dog is up to date on his rabies vaccine, but was not previously microchipped, then the rabies vaccine must be administered again, AFTER the microchip has been implanted. These can be done the same day, as long as the microchip is done first.

When you get the microchip implanted, ask the vet for either (i) a microchip certificate, or (ii) a letter from the vet stating that the microchip was read before the vaccine was given. I got both, just to be safe.

Step 4: Vaccines.

Specifically rabies, but we went ahead and got all of them. This has to be done at least 21 days prior to entry, and the dog has to enter the country prior to the expiration of the vaccine (duh).

Step 5: Veterinary exam (the tricky part)

This has to be done within 10 days of you leaving the country. The exam has to be performed by a USDA-certified vet. The vet fills out and signs this form, called an Annex IV (http://www.blv.admin.ch/themen/04670/05325/05326/05328/05334/index.html?lang=en). Tell the vet to fill it out in block letters, in blue ink (not kidding). Some airlines also require their own health certificate to be filled out – United does not, the Annex IV form is sufficient for them.

The Annex IV form then has to be certified by a USDA office; these are regional - click here to find your local office: http://www.aphis.usda.gov/wps/portal/aphis/ourfocus/animalhealth/sa_contact_us/!ut/p/a1/rZFNc4IwEIZ_i4cemawBCRzBL1ConTpthUsmRJG0GBCiU_99g-PFg9bONKds5tmdZ_OiFK1QKtlRbJkSlWRlV6c2nS0C3PcBh9OlO4bw-X0SOxExF4GlgUQDw6kXWCQCAMvBEI78YETcGCC0f-v_QClKuVS1KlDC6kK0lFdSbaSipcga1pyeoGW0OjQ0r_ihPVdMih0rabFhpSrOL10P44oe2m5ezcUaJZAxYjrENrAFmWHZmBturm9r1877fO1kfJBf_OHG8eAh_ytkOvY1MoleyHyGYT64APe-6AzccUi0JLlp4Vpo-cetZw_EKj73-9TT4XRxfCu0-pd09GDcxMN4q32ZKgwh8wqtrpl697ZzzJPx9eqAOSiPkdfr_QD4qiO9/?1dmy&urile=wcm%3apath%3a%2Faphis_content_library%2Fsa_our_focus%2Fsa_animal_health%2Fsa_contact_us%2Fct_program_contacts.  In Texas, this office is located in downtown Austin.

The tricky part: There’s no guarantee how quickly the USDA office will get the certified form back to you. You can overnight it, you can include a pre-paid label for them to send it back to you, but the lovely woman on the phone informed me that they still can’t guarantee that you will get it back in time. Cool!

Extra tricky part: United requires these papers to be faxed to them 4 business days prior to your international departure.

Solution to this problem: Go the USDA office in person and have them sign it. It’s the only way to guarantee that you have the paperwork completed and in-hand (and delivered to the airline) in time for your travel. Road trip!

Step 6: Other paperwork.

There’s a form called a “Declaration of Non-Commercial Movement”, basically just stating that you aren’t moving the pets overseas to sell them. It’s included as the last page in the Annex IV form (link above), and it doesn’t have to be sent off or certified by anyone. Just fill it out and have it with you during travel.

Step 7: Get ready for the flight (night before).

The kennel needs to have 2 “LIVE ANIMAL” stickers on it (one on the top and one on the side), as well as orientation labels (“This side up”) to at least two sides of the kennel. You also need a food/water container that secures to the kennel door – I was told to freeze some water in there, so that as it gradually melts, the dog can drink it and it won’t spill everywhere.

They require the bottom of the kennel to have some sort of absorbent material in it (i.e., a puppy pad). We put a puppy pad in there with a foam bed on top of it. The kennel can’t have any toys or treats in it – we put one of our t-shirts in there.

Bring a Ziploc baggie with 14 oz. of food in it with you to the drop-off location – airline employees will secure it to the kennel.

You need to have the following papers with you during travel:

1. Annex IV
2. Declaration of Non-Commercial Movement
3. Microchip certificate/letter from the vet
4. Vaccine records
5. Airline health certificate if required

Step 8: Drop your animal off.

Two hours early for domestic flights, three hours early for international flights. If you’re flying out of Intercontinental in Houston, the drop-off point is NOT at the airport – you’ll have to take them to the Air Cargo facility before you park your car or go to Passenger Drop-off.
  
And that’s it! Piece of cake, right? Our travel days are July 27-29, so we haven’t actually done that part yet. We’ll see how it goes!

 Pouting on the way home from the vet

Also pouting 

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[1] This applies to pretty much all of Europe, but only cats and dogs. Other animals have weird requirements, or it isn’t possible.

First Trip to Geneva

I wrote this awhile back, right after it happened about 2 months ago – it’s a funny story now, but not so much when I was going through it.

At the beginning of May, my new employer flew me out to Geneva for a quick trip to meet the team I will be working with and try to do a little house hunting - which didn’t happen, because of the following series of unfortunate events.

The plan was to fly from Chicago (where I was at the time for my current job) to London on an American Airlines/British Airways code-share flight and London to Geneva on British Airways. This was a terrible plan because, American Airlines.

Let me start off by saying: I know better. I have NEVER had a good experience with American, they have ALWAYS managed to screw up my trip, and I ALWAYS make an effort to avoid them. But, given the short notice and time constraints for this trip, I didn’t have a choice.

My flight was scheduled to take off at 4:40 pm on Friday, which would put me in Geneva at 11 am Saturday. It was pouring rain all day Friday in Chicago, so I knew before I even got to the airport that I would have some sort of delay. As the rain let up though, an announcement was made that our plane had “technical issues.” Awesome. They needed to go get a new part out of a warehouse, which was not actually on airport grounds, and then install the new part. They assured us that we would still get out of Chicago that night, and although we would all likely miss our connections, we would be automatically booked onto the next available connection.

Meanwhile, I made friends with a lovely Scottish woman in her mid-60’s (shout-out to Dorothy) at the cellphone charging station, which made for a much more pleasant wait. From about 6 pm to midnight, Dorothy and I kept each other company.

Over the next several hours, 8ish to midnightish, they managed to install the new part – but by then it was too late, and the flight crew had reached the end of their shift. Flight canceled. It’s now 1 am, and I go into survival mode.

In an effort to get in front of all the other angry passengers, I hustled over to the desk, retrieved hotel and meal vouchers for me and Dorothy, and herded her out of the airport to get a cab to the La Quinta that American Airlines so graciously reserved for us.

I got re-booked for a flight out of Miami for the following day – which meant I had lost an entire day of my 4-day trip. It also meant that I had missed the 3 appointments I made to look at apartments. To say I was mad is an understatement. I slept for about 3 hours in a humid La Quinta room then headed back to the airport for my flight to Miami. Survival mode still engaged.   

My American flight from Chicago to Miami was delayed (obviously), but thankfully not enough to make me miss my flight to London. I got to my gate in Miami, saw that my flight to London was now a British Airways flight and not American, and the angels in heaven sang and rejoiced.

Throughout the rest of the trip, I took notes on my phone of all the important lessons learned/things I wanted to remember to tell Andy about Geneva; I think these notes pretty much sum up my 48 hours there.

1. British Airways flights are incredibly pleasant – a hot meal, whatever you want to drink, plenty of movies to choose from, and, most importantly, a friendly and courteous flight crew. British people are exceptionally polite.
2. London Heathrow Airport is a nightmare. From what I understand, they just finished a massive remodel…and it’s very clean and updated. But, it’s absolutely enormous – I had a 100 minute layover between flights, and I barely made it to my gate in time.
3. The Geneva airport is wonderful – just big enough to have everything you would want in an airport, but small enough that it’s fairly quick to get through. I made it through customs in no time and quickly got my bag.
4. Cabs in Geneva are outrageously expensive. A 10 minute cab ride from the airport to my hotel cost 40 CHF (pretty much equivalent to $40). Public transportation is the way to go.
5. The city shuts down on Sunday. I had been warned of this before the trip, but it was interesting to see in person; very few shops and restaurants were open the day I got there, including the grocery stores.
6. The city is extremely dog friendly – there were dogs EVERYWHERE, both outside on the sidewalks and inside stores and restaurants. There are even bag stations to clean up after them every so often along the sidewalks.
7. When you order a “coffee,” you’re going to get an espresso. There is no such thing as coffee as we know it, as far as I can tell. Must order lattes.
8. It’s a BEAUTIFUL city. Parks and trees everywhere, cobblestone streets, stunning architecture, and all along a gorgeous lake. AND – people drink out of the public fountains. Like a fountain we might throw a penny in? They fill their water bottles in them, because the water is that clean.
9. A LOT of people still smoke cigarettes.
10. The traffic lights turn yellow in between green and red, but ALSO between red and green.

Aside from the time I spent in my new office, I went on a city bus tour and just explored a bit on my own – walked around the lake, poked in a few shops, ate at a couple restaurants. I’m not very good at traveling alone; I don’t enjoy it that much, because I don’t like talking to strangers, so there’s no one to talk to. This was exacerbated in a foreign country, where I had to start every conversation with “Do you speak English?” Gotta get going on my French! I’m excited to go back with Andy and experience more of the city with him/figure out what life is going to look like. 

I didn't take a ton of pictures, but here's a few:

 Espresso and gelato on lac Léman (Lake Geneva) - you can see the Jet d'Eau in the background, one of Geneva's landmarks. The water shoots 460 feet in the air.

 United Nations

 The Reformation Wall, a memorial dedicated to the four fathers of the Protestant Reformation (Theodore Beza, John Calvin, William Farel, and John Knox)

We’re moving to Switzerland!

So, this is my blog.

Because we’re moving to Switzerland!

I thought it would be fun to keep a blog of all our adventures throughout this process and our time in Switzerland – both for our own benefit and to keep anyone who’s interested updated. We’ve also found through all of our moving research, the personal blogs written by everyday people who had similar experiences have been the most helpful. Maybe we can help some future expats out along the way!

For the first post, I thought it would be fitting to answer a lot of the questions we’ve gotten from people when we tell them we’re moving.

What’s in Switzerland?

Ohhh so much! But most specifically, a job. I was contacted by a recruiter in December 2014 about a position that immediately piqued my interest and was the beginning of a LOOONG interview process that eventually resulted in a job offer.

What’s the job?

It’s exactly what I’ve been doing, which is transfer pricing consulting – just with a different company.

What’s Andy doing?

To be determined. He’s applying for jobs in Geneva as well, and also considering working remotely for a non-Swiss company.

What language do they speak there?

Switzerland has four official languages that are largely regional – French is spoken in Geneva.

Nope, we don’t know any French.

Geneva has a lot of unique characteristics that made it appealing to us, but a big one is the fact that English is widely spoken (…at least that’s what we’ve been told. We’ll keep you posted on that.) It’s an international hub where a whole bunch of large international organizations are headquartered; so at least professionally, we don’t expect the language barrier to be too much of a problem. In fact, one of the reasons I was recruited for my new job is that I’m a native English speaker.

That said, we plan on learning as much French as possible – if nothing else, it’s part of the experience!

Didn’t y’all like, JUST move to Colorado?

We moved to Colorado December 1, 2012, so we’ve been here about 2.5 years. It hasn’t been that long, but we didn’t JUST move here.

Okay…but you really did JUST buy a house.

We did. And as most of you know, our house has been…an adventure. While we do love the house, we are EXTREMELY relieved to be going back to renting for a while. We spent a lot of time, blood, sweat & tears on our house – which has fortunately paid off. And now I look forward to taking a break from DIY’ing and calling a landlord for every little thing possible.

What about the dogs?

If you couldn’t tell by the title of the blog, they’re coming with us. DUH. This was never a question for us; if we couldn’t bring the dogs with us, we wouldn’t have considered it. From what we can tell, Switzerland looks to be very dog-friendly…and Sam and Trevor are PUMPED. Trevor heard about Swiss fondue and was immediately sold.

What about all your stuff?

We’re moving some of it, not moving a lot of it. Not only will we be downsizing from a 2,000 square foot house to a roughly 700 square foot apartment, but it isn’t super cost-efficient to move a ton of furniture. We’re selling both cars, and we’ll see how it goes in Geneva without one for a while; it would be ideal to just use public transportation, so that’s the plan for now.

Okay, I guess y’all have thought this through…but why?

This question is funny to us – our natural, immediate response is “Why wouldn’t we?” I think this is best answered by a list (and I love lists):

1.      Adventure. Andy has a need for it, and the longer I’m married to him, the more I need it too. We live life once, and we don’t ever want to wonder what could have happened or what life would have looked like if we had just taken a risk.

2.      Travel. Traveling is one of the great loves of my life, and it’s something that Andy and I always agreed we would try to prioritize as much as possible. For both of us, studying abroad was one of the best things we’ve ever done; we loved experiencing new cultures, and we want to see as much of the world as possible. But, since graduating college, getting jobs, and getting married, we realized something pretty fundamental about travel – it’s EXPENSIVE. That is, traveling from the US to other continents is expensive…within Europe, or from Europe to other places? Not so expensive.

3.      It’s an awesome opportunity. Those of you that I talk to regularly know that there were a few other potential locations in the running before we settled on Geneva. Did I mention that the interview process took forever? Well, during that time, we also looked into other opportunities throughout Europe. One of the awesome things about a career in transfer pricing is that it is extremely international – I quickly realized that there were a lot of places I could potentially work. I had conversations with both external recruiters and HR at my current company and evaluated a lot of different possibilities: Luxembourg, Budapest, Oslo, Aberdeen, and Amsterdam were all on the list at one point or another. Geneva was an easy first choice for us, for a few different reasons (I also love lists WITHIN lists):

a.       My job. My new company is a market leader in Europe in transfer pricing, and it will be a great professional experience to work with them. Also, the work that they do and clients they serve are very much in line with my experience and strengths, so I think it will be an easy transition. Scratch that – easier than it might be elsewhere.

b.       Quality of life. Switzerland tops every list out there in this category. See?

http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/23/travel/feat-world-happiest-countries-2015/index.html

http://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.jsp

http://www.businessinsider.com/top-countries-on-oecd-better-life-index-2013-5#5-switzerland-11

c.       Language. Already mentioned this a bit, but the combination of i) widespread use of English, and ii) French being the primary language was a big plus for us. French is way easier to pick up on than Hungarian, Norwegian, or Dutch. 

d.       Location. Pretty central location within Europe = ease of travel.

e.       Activities. So much room for them! Geneva is within an hour or two of some of the best skiing IN THE WORLD. Yes please.

f.        Chocolate and cheese. Obviously.

So, there you go. We’re SO excited, and a little scared – there are a lot of changes in store for us, to say the least. The plan for this blog is to write about all the adventures, speed bumps, highs and lows, both as we make the move and obviously once we’re there. If that sounds interesting to you, stick around!

And for good measure, a picture of Sam and Trevor: