Shipping your car, your furniture, and all your other stuff to Hawaii isn’t as hard as you think. Cargo ships go in and out of Hawaii harbors all week long making it pretty easy to get your favorite recliner to the islands.

Shipping Your Car to Hawaii

If you’re looking to ship your car to Hawaii from the mainland you have a lot of options. Basically what happens is you go through a service that gets your car from your home to the west coast. Then from the west coast that car is put on a cargo ship run most likely by Matson and your car is shipped to Hawaii. It takes anywhere from 2 to 6 weeks, 6 weeks being the norm, to get your car from door to door.

The easiest way to get started shipping your car to Hawaii is to look in your local yellow pages under shipping. You can also go online and searching for car shipping company. These sites will most likely put you in touch with a local shipper.

Then you have to choose between shipping covered or uncovered. Uncovered means your car has the potential to be on the deck or outside of a cargo crate. 6 weeks of salt air on the ocean with your car not moving can be brutal. We suggest you choose inside even though it’s about $500 more. It’s worth it.

Then, you clean your car out of everything. Everything. Trust us, they’ll search it when they get to your house and pull out anything that’s extra. This is the unfortunate thing about shipping your car to Hawaii. All that extra room you could stuff things goes wasted.

Next, you give them your keys, some companies will pick the car up and others will require you to drop it off. This depends on who you go with and might cost extra as a service. Your choice on that one.

Finally, you wait the 6 weeks until you get a call that your vehicle has arrived in Hawaii. You go and pick it up or, as with the drop off, sometimes they’ll drop the car off where you live or work.

Shipping Your Furniture to Hawaii

Shipping your furniture and other stuff to Hawaii is quite similar to shipping your car to Hawaii explained above. You start again by looking in your local yellow pages or on the internet for a shipping service that gets stuff to Hawaii.

Then you set up the details. Some services allow you to pack your own stuff and still insure it while most require that they pack the stuff or at least look through the contents and provide extra padding for the boxes. Large items like TVs and such will most likely have to be packed by the moving company. Make sure to inquire about this before you start packing all your stuff up.

Then you’ll need to document every single thing that you are packing. It’s also good to put an estimated value on each piece that you’ll be shipping to Hawaii, or at least on each box. For large items it’s best to have your receipt. It makes the insurance process a lot easier.

Finally you schedule a moving day and get the movers to show up and get your stuff onto a truck, plane, or rail on it’s way to the west coast. You’ll be seeing that stuff again in 2 to 6 weeks so make sure it’s nothing that you really need. Ship that stuff via UPS or FedEx, or pay extra to carry things on the plane.