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Years in international removals
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Trusted International Moving Network
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Bovey Tracey holds around 7,400 people on TQ13 on the eastern edge of Dartmoor, a town with a long craft and making tradition. This page covers the household item that needs more thought than any other on an international move: a piano.
International Removals Companies is a route matching platform, not a physical removal company. Your enquiry goes to vetted movers in the AGM Group network, and the partner best suited to your destination comes back with a single quote.
For international movers an upright weighs as much as several wardrobes and an overstrung grand a good deal more, concentrated on a handful of castors. It needs the right number of people, the right equipment and a route out that has been looked at properly, and none of that is a normal crew's default.
Then the part almost nobody plans for. A piano is a wooden instrument built around tension, and the humidity where it arrives is frequently nothing like the humidity it has lived in for decades.
Tell the moving company at the first enquiry that there is a piano and what kind. It changes the crew size, the equipment and sometimes the vehicle, and a surveyor told about it plans a route out and does not discover one.
Steps, tight turns and soft ground all matter more with a piano than with anything else in the house, because the weight cannot be split between two people and shuffled. It goes as one object or it does not go.
Wood moves with moisture long after the international movers have gone. A piano that has spent forty years in a Devon house and arrives somewhere much drier or much wetter will shift, and it will go out of tune however carefully it travelled.
Let it settle for several weeks in the room it will live in before booking a tuner. Tuning it the week it arrives wastes the money, because it will move again. Smaller instruments are the same in miniature: slacken guitar and violin strings before packing and retune after they have acclimatised.
Volume and destination set the shipping. A piano is volume, weight and specialist labour, and it belongs on its own line.
Priced by the cubic metre
around £920 to £1,850
Space alongside others
around £1,720 to £3,310
The whole box, yours
around £4,680 to £6,760
Crew, equipment and crating
quoted as its own item
Ask for the piano quoted separately, including any crating. Cover on it may be conditional on how it is packed. The county page carries the wider bands.
Planning price ranges reviewed August 2026. Next review August 2027.
Newton Abbot is close, Exeter is within half an hour and the A38 runs past, so the choice of international removal companies here is good.
Ask directly whether they handle pianos in house or bring in a specialist. Both answers are fine; not having an answer is not.
Buying abroad or paying a deposit in another currency is part of most overseas moves, so we include access to currency exchange through trusted partners.
Export entry and shipping paperwork are the matched firm's work, built from the list you valued.
List a piano by make, model and serial number, and value it properly. It is usually the reason a policy needs a high value schedule, and an understated figure caps what you can recover.
Older instruments may contain materials that are restricted, ivory keys being the obvious one. Raise anything pre war at survey and never at a port.
At the first enquiry. It changes the crew size, the equipment and sometimes the vehicle.
The weight cannot be split and shuffled. It goes as one object, so steps and tight turns matter far more.
Yes, and not immediately. Let it settle several weeks in the room it will live in, because it will move with the humidity.
Slacken the strings before packing and retune once they have acclimatised. Same principle, smaller scale.
They can. Restricted materials apply to instruments as much as furniture, so raise anything pre war at survey.
Yes, across TQ13 and the eastern moor edge.
Where Bovey Tracey enquiries usually look next.
How a mover handles pianos differs, and some bring in specialists. Restrictions on materials such as ivory are set by international agreement and by destination law. Nothing here is customs advice. Prices quoted date from the year to August 2026.
How long an instrument needs to settle depends on the destination climate.
Send the TQ13 postcode, the destination, your date, a rough inventory and say what kind of piano it is.
Send your move detailsInternational Removals Companies
International Removals Companies is the official online platform for FIDI FAIM and BAR Overseas certified international moving companies in AGM Group.
County detail, the terminal run and the full price bands sit on the Devon international removals page.