When we moved to Barcelona the first thing we took care of was finding a reliable and cheap removal company who also does international shipping.
The first option we tried was Anyvan since we used them before for our move from Germany to London. You basically put in where you want to move and how much stuff you have. Then you will get quite a few quotes and you can pick the best offer. The system also has ratings, so you kind of get a picture of who the best option is.
With this service you obviously need to know how much stuff you have. For us that was not really difficult, since we normally sell most furniture and only move with boxes. But starting to pack early really helps.
Some quotes will be really expensive and others quite cheap, but they all normally come with some sort of insurance. The removal companies also change their quotes based on other quotes you got and you can always ask them questions and try to get a different price.
In our case we also added our removal profile into Shiply to compare prices. That way we actually found our removal company.
Removaleurope contacted us with a price but told us to go to their website and use the chat to get an even cheaper price, since it wouldn’t go via Shiply and they wouldn’t need to pay commission.
So we contacted them and got a really good quote. They also had good ratings on Shiply, so we trusted them. Our quote included a luton van just for us and two weeks of storage in Barcelona, since we needed to store our stuff somewhere, because we didn’t have a fixed place yet. Our price in the end was around 1400 £. We had to pay a little deposit and then we paid the rest before delivery.
On the moving day one guy came on time and started loading the van, but we also did help him. You can book two people if needed or packing as well.
He then drove our stuff straight to Barcelona and we received a confirmation when it arrived in the storage.
We were also able to expand the storage for a little extra fee because we couldn’t find a good place in the first two weeks.
Later we notified them where to deliver and two people actually delivered it quite quickly.
Overall their service was really good and I can recommend them. If you don’t want to trust a “random” company, you can always just use Anyvan, where you can really see if a company is trusted or not.
Here are our take-aways:
- Use Anyvan or Shiply to get really good quotes
- Removaleurope did a good job
- You can always add services like packing or extra men
- Make sure you start packing early so you know what you have
- I recommend selling a lot of stuff especially with moving international
- Bubblewrap is always good for packing, we wrapped everything except boxes
- If you hire a whole van, keep an eye on the weight
- Searching for a removal company one month before your moving date is totally fine
- Removal from London to Barcelona will take them at least 48h
- Sometimes you can find a removal company which lets you add stuff to existing removals on the same route, which is cheaper
- Make sure all costs are covered like fuel, ferry or toll etc.
For more information about moving to Barcelona, click here!