Cheapest but most reliable INSURED courier for sending a £2.5K guitar?

electricfurnace

Hi all

Been a while since I couriered a guitar. Use the old faithful interparcel usually.

UPS I hear are decent.

Only thing - if I increase value to £2K (the max they will allow), it is an extra £76+VAT on top of the normal courier cost.

Is that about right?! I cant seem to find anywhere cheaper with full insurance cover!

Whitecat

That amount sounds about right. Sometimes UPS direct turns up a lower number once insurance is added on for some people, give it a go, but Interparcel is the best aggregator as they are the only ones who actually cover musical instruments in full. Parcelmonkey and Parcel2Go don't, or if they do it's with tonnes of restrictions/fine print.

The reason shops can do it so cheap/free is that they have other business insurance that covers possible loss/theft/damage etc that they just renew annually and then they don't have to pay on a per-freight basis.

BloodEagle

UPS via Transglobal express - insurance Via the specific ‘valuable items’ insurance up to 3k is an extra £38 

robinbowes

I'd get a return train ticket for that sort of instrument.

MLten80

don't use UPS, they'll take 3+ months to refund you when its stolen at the depot

:0

guitars4you

Whitecat said:

That amount sounds about right. Sometimes UPS direct turns up a lower number once insurance is added on for some people, give it a go, but Interparcel is the best aggregator as they are the only ones who actually cover musical instruments in full. Parcelmonkey and Parcel2Go don't, or if they do it's with tonnes of restrictions/fine print.

The reason shops can do it so cheap/free is that they have other business insurance that covers possible loss/theft/damage etc that they just renew annually and then they don't have to pay on a per-freight basis.

Agree with the last paragraph

I tend to use the UPS option via Interparcel as it works out better for me - On a bad day any courier will deliver a parcel late, miss-route a parcel hence a day or so delay - Like it or loathe it, the sheer amount of brown parcels they have to handle on a day to day basis then it is inevitable - In the main I have no issue with UPS - I only recall 1 parcel lost (which eventually came back) and 1 parcel damaged - That is in the last 15 years