Shipping your large pet US -> EU

When moving from SF Bay Area to the Netherlands one of the challenges for our family was Freya. Our glorious 75lb Leonberger puppy (6mo old at time of flying). And secondarily our two Ragdoll kitties (merely 12lb each), Powder and Phantom. There were some videos and guides out that went over some of the options, but unfortunately the specific solution varies based on your needs. In general the options are:

1. Cabin: Cheapest option, a few hundred dollars per pet; But only if your pet can fit underneath your seat. This was a no go for Freya, and because it's a long flight we didn't want to do so for the cats as based on our research being stuck in the noisy cabin would be more stress for us as well as the cats (not to mention less leg room).
2. "Checked" Cargo: Some airlines still allow you to check in your pet as cargo yourself. This is only a little more expensive (around $500 when we were flying, airline dependent), but sadly with the enshittification of airlines, even European airlines have stopped offering this service directly to customers. Forcing you to go with an option that is an order of magnitude more expensive. Also, this adds a bunch of extra work and stress to your already very long transition (You'll need to get to the airport up to 6 hours before your flight, and will have to wait a number of hours after landing to get the pets through customs).
3. Pet Delivery Service: These services are between $5000-$7500 or more depending, and provide door to door delivery for your pet, the pet often ends up flying the same as it would have checked cargo, but for many airlines you now need to pay the intermediary. This is the route we were forced to go.
4. Pet Cruise: Honestly, this option seems to suck. It's weeks at sea, hard to say if pets will like it, and while you can travel with your pet, they spend most of their time kenneled (at least in those I checked) you can't seem to have your pet with you in your room. Also expensive, so not sure why'd you go this route.
5. Pet Jet: There are a few companies that split the cost of a jet among multiple passengers and allow pets (including large pets) in the cabin. This was more expensive than pet delivery, and frankly sounded chaotic for our 12h dutch flight. YMMV.

We tried pretty hard to find a way to send the pets checked cargo, but in the end, ended up calling Anthony Denicker of PetTransport Pro - who flew out to San Francisco the day before our flight, took all our pets and worked with his partner to get the pets delivered to our address the same day as our flight. We shipped all 3 pets at the same time, and the ended up on the same direct KLM flight as the one I ended up taking. If you are looking for a reasonable (but still expensive) option for your situation, I'd recommend reaching out and getting started with Anthony. Read on for tips if you'd like to try and DIY and save a good deal of money, as well as some tips and tricks that we learned along the way.

Finding a flight

Because having a layover adds kennel time, and stress to the flight for the crated passengers, as well as additional possibilities for massive headaches (delayed or re-routed flights, etc) it's best to find a direct flight. There is a great tool for this (free, with a reasonable upgrade option if you want to get fancy with filtering), FlightConnections.com - Put in your destination, and you can see visually every direct flight offered to that destination, you can also put in a date range, as often flight availability changes month to month.

Tapping on Airlines, will show you the "short list" of airlines that fly direct, or you can just click on a city that you can reach by car and see a list of the airlines that you can ride, you then have to lookup the current policy (search "<airline> international pet policy" on google) for each airline.

In March 2026 there were 6 carriers that flew directly from US to AMS (Amsterdam): American Airlines (Domestic, Mexico and Canada only), Delta (Only to US or Canada), JetBlue (small pets only), KLM (Yes, with big caveats) and United (US Military only).

So only KLM allowed for self checked cargo pets, and there was a big disqualifying caveat for us:

Pets cannot travel in the hold of KLM flights with Boeing 787-9, Boeing 787-10, and Airbus A321neo aircraft, nor on German Airways flights.

After filtering further in flight connections for our time window (march) there were no qualifying flights from SFO :( – Though there was a 777 flight starting in April. So we had to go pet transport.

If you go this route, then let us know, you'll need the info about USDA certification and pet carrier below as well.

USDA Certification

Other countries vary, and it's worth checking but for US to the Netherlands this for us at least was fairly straight forward, check with your airline or pet transporter for up to date and relevant details, but in general:

1. Pet must be chipped, and have documentation proving it's been chipped
2. Pet must be vaccinated for rabies
3. Put must be certified for travel by a USDA certified veterinarian within 10 days of travel
4. USDA must review and certify the paperwork from your vet before flight, for this recommend sending the USDA a pre-addressed and postage paid Fedex overnight envelope with your paperwork so they can get it back to you ASAP, for us this process was quick (2 days for digital paperwork and 3 for the physical copy from getting sent by the vet), but because the timing (10 days before flight for the appointment) it's worth putting a rush on it.
5. Pet must be healthy, no obvious signs of sickness on day of travel (Freya got mild conjunctivitis 4 days before we flew out, thankfully drops cleared it right up.)

Getting the right carrier

This one is remarkably hard, you must have an IATA certified pet carrier, but unfortunately they don't actually certify pet carriers just provide guidelines. So there are a lot of carriers on the web that claim to be airline worthy that will be rejected when you should fly. Based on the recommendations from our pet transporter there are really just 2 companies that make pet crates that are reliably approved by various airlines, and fortunately they are reasonably priced (don't get the expensive "Impact Dog Crate", bad experiences here and still waiting for refund). We went with the Pet Mate Sky Dog Kennel – Which comes in various sizes (XXL for freya was just large enough) – sadly they don't make them bigger so if she gets larger (and she will), we'll either have to custom build one or add extensions to the middle (hand made) to get an appropriate height. The IATA provides guidelines, but this calculator from QA was helpful. For the kitties we got smaller pet mate kennels. The pet transporter bought mesh to zip tie onto the windows (plastic meshing) for the cat crates as one of the IATA rules is they shouldn't be able to get their paws out, and the smaller kitty paws could have gone through.

It's worthwhile to crate train your dog prior, as it's a great option for introducing to new home as well as making the flight more comfortable. The flight itself went smoothly and the pets were delivered 3 hours after landing to our front door, chipper and ready to explore their new home.