I just read in another thread that a fellow scheduled a re-fret and set-up with an out of town luthier, boxed the instrument up, and then cancelled the job when UPS quoted him $400 to insure the package.
Also, I shipped an old, lightweight hard shell guitar case from Tennessee to California earlier this year. UPS wanted about $125 to ship it the slow way. 3 day shipping would have cost another $100. I ended up shipping it by the Postal Service for $105, also the slow way. It took over 2 weeks for the package to arrive at its destination.
I cringe when I think about the cost of safely shipping a valuable instrument these days.
And I don't fly anymore, but if I did, the problems of carrying an instrument, especially a larger instrument like a guitar on the airlines are well known.
It seems to me that there is an opportunity here for someone to establish a courier service for musical instruments and other fragile items. It would require a clever plan to keep such a service affordable, but I think it could be managed if there were enough customers to maintain a good volume of shipments. Perhaps a way to keep costs down would be to maintain a storefront in cities over a certain size where the customers could drop off and pick up their shipments. A few generations ago, this sort of thing was done at railroad stations.
Or maybe this is just an impossible pipe dream. But I'll put the idea out there anyway.
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