How can you ship your motorcycle cheap with air transport (airfreight)?

When we are traveling continent to continent one of the expensive things is shipping or airfreight our motorcycle to another continent.

Why motorcycle transport is expensive by air?

First of all, most cargo companies or airlines cargo companies don’t work with the customer directly, especially if they are in the dangerous class like motorcycles.  Therefore you need to find an agency for it and pay them.

Second, motorcycle needs to go to the custom service for exit the country to check VIN, plate and engine number.  The agency can take care of it.

Third, you need to pack and carry your motorcycle to the airport. General the agency doesn’t make a air freight box and sent you to another service / agency.

All of them are extra costs for motorcycle transport by air. Also, you must pay for air freight as well. 🙁

Air waybill has change a lot with motorcycle cargo box size.

You must make a box or pallet for the motorcycle as small as possible because an airlines cargo companies calculate transport cost with the size. The kg is not important for your bill, only important for them self when they put the motorcycle in the plane, I suppose for balance.

We used airfreight from Khartoum, Sudan to Istanbul, Turkey. The size of the motorcycle was 220*130*130 when fully pack with side bags and rear bags. The air waybill was around 500 USD like that. But you can make your motorcycle small so you can fly your motorcycle cheap.

Here our video about shipping, you can watch before keep continue to read :  

So, we got out our bags. We removed the screen and mirrors. We got the wheels and mudguard out. We wanted to take the plate and back panel as well but it wasn’t easy to that with Honda CRF250L.  Finally, our motorcycle size came 190*90*105 for air cargo. What was the air freight cost for one motorcycle after that? 🙂 228 USD.  We saved 232 USD for each motorcycles cargo.

Small size of air cargo motorcycle pack 🙂

Find a cheap air cargo package company for motorcycles.

We didn’t pay any extra money to pack our motorcycle. When we were talking the company we showed some photos, which my brother sent to us from his air cargo packages, how we will pack motorcycles (you can use ours haha).

We also told them we will get empty the tank, remove battery pole heads because we know that the motorcycle goes through dangerous good check. Also we said that we wont put motorcycle in a box or plastic wrap around so the custom service can see plate and VIN number.

We made a pallet because forklift carries package to air cargo and we stabled them with strap clamps. We carried our Honda CRF20L on the back of a towing vehicle to the airport. We scared a little when towing vehicle was carrying because pallets were forklift cars. 🙂

Normally, the agency doesn’t want to take a risk and send you another company to pack because they know the company how they can pack for dangerous good or custom service. After discuss  a while with the agency in Sudan they allowed to us make our own pack. We wanted one thing from them, close our motorcycle with plastic wrap after finish all control. We told them we can pay how much cost but they didn’t take anything. So, our motorcycle could be clean and nothing fall down any case. We gave them our motorcycle on the first photo to transport

we said bye them in Khartoum airport, Sudan

and motorcycle arrive to us like this. They were coming from Africa so the package can look like a Zebra. 🙂

We are inside to the store. They brought our motorcycles

Don’t forget after put your motorcycle on the pallet how much you have space it is yours. Therefore, you can carry some extra things on it as well. We were flying with a cheap fly which means we must pay extra for luggage. We put our helmet, boots, motorcycle gears and some little bags around the motorcycle and stabled them. 

We heard from a lot of rider who use air cargo (airfreight) to transport their motorcycles some of them paid a lot of money to package between 200 USD to 600 USD. We paid 30 USD for each motorcycles cargo pack. So, talk a lot air cargo agency to make yourself or search and find cheap company to pack for you. Don’t pay a lot of money.

GS