Part 2: International flights

If you are flying internationally with your cat, you have all of the same concerns as in the prior post, but more so. You will still be able to find airlines that let you carry your cat on with you, but you will need to check that they accept them on the particular route you want to travel. Yep. The airline might take pets in general, but not to the specific place you are headed to, depending on the length of the route and the rules of the country you’ll land in.

For example, I’ve had excellent experiences flying with Aífe on Lufthansa between Seattle and Berlin. So when I needed to move from Germany to Ireland, I was looking forward to booking a flight with them. However, even though they take pets on flights all over the world, it turns out that they won’t take animals on flights to Ireland or the UK. It doesn’t say that on their website, and the first representative I spoke to said it would be fine for her to join me on the flight I was planning to book. But then several other airlines I was comparing said you couldn’t bring cats onto their flights into Ireland or the UK, so I called Lufthansa back to double-check. It took my talking to several representatives before I could confirm that there was a restriction on flights to those islands.

I called the Irish Department of Agriculture to ask why all of the airlines I’d talked to said the Irish government wouldn’t let them carry pets into Ireland.