Pet Travel Expert

While Angola may seem like a far off place for pets, we've actually moved three lucky cats from Scotland to Angola and, most recently, from Angola to Cairo, Egypt!

Whether traveling with pets into, or out of, Angola, there will most certainly be hurdles when dealing with Angolan bureaucracy and infrastructure. It's not overwhelming, but it will save a lot of time going into these pet relocations prepared.

The important thing to realize is that Angola is still a developing, and as such, certain protocols have a tendency to be needlessly obfuscated, not as a means to simply confuse you, but rather due to the fact that a great number of Angolan authorities don't have the answer to many questions themselves and can often attempt to "pass the buck".

When importing pets into Angola, we typically only provide Door-to-Port services. While there are cargo agents available in Luanda, they have proven themselves to be rather ineffective and seem to have a habit of making things more difficult than they already are.

In essence, if a customer has the standard vaccines in place and a health certificate issued by a vet within 10 days of departure (endorsed by the USDA, stamped by the Angolan consulate, AND translated into Portuguese), then the import requirements have been met.

It is important to let customers know that customs can often take a number of hours, and, albeit unfortunate, it does sometimes pay to "grease the wheels" so to speak once in Luanda.

As for export, there is only one airline that is legally able to bring pets out of the country --- TAAG Angola Airlines.

Given this, it is recommended to transit via Johannesburg for most any destination in the world. This is true for four reasons:

1. TAAG offers non-stop flights to JNB every other day of the week.
2. Pet-Safe flights to a great number of destination countries can be made from Johannesburg.
3. Transit requirements at JNB are very simple.
4. Forwarding services and transit at JNB are very cost-effective.

In these cases, we need to inform clients that they will need to make any flight arrangements and airport deliveries in Luanda themselves, while we will take over once the pets arrive JNB.

We can attempt to arrange services from Luanda, but previous attempts have proven that this takes much too long and the cargo agents are not privy to pet protocols, resulting in moves turning into lengthy, frustrating affairs rather quickly.