The dogs. How are we moving the dogs overseas? They’re French Bulldogs and Frenchies are not known for being… particularly great at stressful situations. Especially stressful situations in tropical conditions.
I love these boys. I’m not going anywhere without them – rehoming is NOT an option. I’ll stay before I do that. We’re the only family Bennie knows, and Blue… well, if you read his intro post, you’ll understand why I can’t rehome him.
The biggest problem is flying with them. Our boys are not small. They are not typical sized Frenchies. They aren’t overweight (well, Bennie isn’t lol). They’re just built BIG. The average full grown adult male Frenchie is about 17-22 pounds. Bennie hit 20 pounds well before he was a year old. He’s now about 30 pounds of solid muscle. He’s a straight up UNIT. And Blue… Blue is overweight, but can’t exercise much and doesn’t overeat. And he’s about 35-40 pounds. No airlines are going to allow these two in the cabin due to their size. And most don’t allow them in the cargo hold either (which doesn’t upset me, I’d rather they be topside with us).
Time to research professional pet transport companies. Need to find one with experience with brachycephalic breeds – and a great track record. Time to post on Facebook’s Flying with Dogs page. And the Frenchie pages. And the expats in Da Nang pages. Everywhere I can think of that someone might have the answers.
$14k to transport both dogs with a reputable transporter. Not as bad as I expected, but not as good as I hoped.
But I’ve got to remember – we’re not JUST transporting 2 Frenchies. We’re transporting 2 Frenchies, 6 humans, AND 4 cats. That’s basically a whole city getting ready to touch down in Da Nang lol. So I started looking up private jets – because why not? Maybe they can be inexpensive enough to make it worthwhile. Most aren’t by the way. Most are somewhere around $250-300k. Not happening. BUT I did find a great site that lists empty legs for private charters – you find the one you want and make them an offer. If they accept your offer, you have a deal. And there were a couple flying back to Cambodia from LA. So if we could get the dogs from Seattle to LA, we could potentially hop the empty leg over to Cambodia and a quick hop over to Vietnam from there. Private jets cost on average $1500-5000 per hour. This is about a 14-hour flight. If we go just higher than middle of that average at $3500/hour, that’s about $50k. If flights are a little more than typical at $5000/seat, that puts our human cost to fly at $30k, plus $14k for the dogs. So a total of $44k… For another $6k, we could fly like royalty, stretch out, have the dogs (and cats) in the cabin with us… and not worry. That’s actually an option worth considering!!
The more I think about it, it’s crazy to think we could potentially hire a private charter to fly our family to Vietnam. And the more I look into it, the more I realize it could be quite cost effective, actually. The only real difficulty is whether a pilot would take $50k to fill the empty leg and whether there will be one available when we need it. Most empty legs aren’t advertised until about 3 weeks out, which is understandable. The downside is that if there is no empty leg available when we need it, we either have to delay our move (which might not even be an option) or take the chance on paying exorbitant amounts for last minute flights on standard commercial airlines.
Probably better to just plan for the airlines, since they are reliably available.
It would’ve been nice though! A girl can dream, right?
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