Dog Transport Service Private Ground or Airline Cargo

Every booking starts with three numbers: where the dog is now, where it needs to be, and when. From there we measure the dog against IATA kennel sizes, check the route for seasonal airline embargoes and breed restrictions, and come back with a private ground price and an air cargo price side by side.

Ground moves run with a single dedicated driver in a climate-controlled vehicle. No shared vans, no transfer hubs, no other people's dogs. The driver stops for water and walks on a schedule set by your dog's age and size, and you get photo and text updates along the way. Long hauls include overnight boarding with feeding and exercise rather than a night in the vehicle.

Air moves are booked on live-animal manifests with carriers we already hold accounts with. You get confirmation at tender, at load and on arrival, and someone from our team is reachable by phone at every one of those checkpoints.

Private ground dog transport starts at $295 and is priced on drive time, billable mileage including the empty return leg the driver has to cover, overnights, and the number of dogs. A 300-mile single-dog run and a 300-mile run that ends 900 miles from the driver's home base are not the same job, and pricing that ignores the repositioning leg is pricing that gets cancelled later.

Air cargo for a dog is driven by crate size before anything else. Airlines bill on the kennel's dimensional weight, so getting the fit right is the cheapest thing you can do — a size-500 kennel where a 400 fits can add hundreds of dollars to a domestic flight. Most domestic dog flights land between $900 and $2,400 all in.

Military families moving on PCS orders receive $300 off, applied to either mode.

Brachycephalic breeds — bulldogs, pugs, boxers, shih tzus, Boston terriers — have shortened airways that make pressurised flight genuinely risky, and most carriers refuse them outright or restrict them to cool-weather departures. For these dogs we route by private ground as a default, not as a fallback.

Summer heat embargoes close many southern cargo hubs between May and September when ramp temperatures exceed carrier limits, and cold embargoes affect northern stations in deep winter. Both can ground a booked flight with little notice; the ground alternative is quoted alongside the flight from the start so there is a plan already in place.

Dogs over roughly 110 lb need a custom-built kennel and, on many aircraft, a specific cargo hold. Those moves are quoted individually — tell us the breed and the four measurements and we will confirm feasibility before you pay anything.