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From Times Online

July 26, 2007

How do we take our poodle back to Vermont?

The Sunday Times opens its travel clinic on a daily basis to answer your holiday queries. Today: flying to Vermont with a dog

Richard Green

My wife and I are returning to our home in Vermont and need some advice on the best way of transporting our poodle by air. Ron & Mare' Mogavero, Birchington-on-Sea, Kent

Sunday Times travel expert, Richard Green, responds: Exiting the arrivals hall clutching a small dog may look easy and glamorous for Paris Hilton and Britney Spears but in fact it's only possible to take a dog into the cabin across the Atlantic on Air France, and then it's only vaguely practical if you are travelling in First Class where there is room for the dog and its container.

For the rest of us, transporting a dog involves grappling with a minefield of rules and regulations, and having your pet travel in the hold. Or you do the sensible thing and talk to an established pet travel agency, like Air Pets (0800 371554), which dispatches over 100 pets a month. For an airport-to-airport service, where the box is provided, expect to pay about £600-800 for a Toy Poodle from London to Boston, or up to £1,500 for a Standard Poodle. Or try Sky Dogs (01629 734 000)

Pets used to be allowed as excess baggage, which meant that you said your goodbyes at check-in, then were reunited at the other end at arrivals. Now however, airlines say that pets must travel as cargo. Either way, they travel in a livestock section of the hold, which is heated and pressurised to the same conditions as the passenger cabin.

So far so good, but the process gets dangerous for the animals, not so much when they are in the air, but when they are being transported from one place to another on the ground. If it's too hot or too cold at the arrival airport, pets can die 60 of them in the last two years on America's airlines for exmaple.

Things are improving though. Continental has invested in pet friendly heated (or cooled) warehouses at its hub airports, and the other American carriers won't transport pets to the States in high summer or mid winter, with ad-hoc embargoes coming into effect with the arrival of extreme weather in between.

AA European Breakdown COver. I am spitting as I have just called the AA to book cover for a 2.5 week trip that I am taking to France. We intend to drive, leave the car in a car park, and then travel on a canal boat up or down the Canal du Midi.
I was about to book online, but wanted to take advantage of a discount voucher so called instead. i was advised that as I was not staying with the car (within a reasonable distance) at all times I could not take out cover. No definition of reasonable distance (as I write I am on my 20th minute of hold on the AA complaints line) and complete refusal to tell me where in the terms and conditions it said that ("it is in their somewhere").
I think people should be made aware of this - as I could easily have booked cover via the web. Everyone in my office agrees that they often take their car abroad and leave it while they do side trips. Please tell your readers. Sadly I have just renewed my AA membership but I shall resign it asap.

Sue Hill, London, London