Traveling With Your Guitar
Hi, everyone around the 
! I'm so excited to finally be fulfilling a user request that has been made repeatedly over the course of the past year! With the world slowly opening up to travel again, I believe it's time to tackle the question: How can we best travel with our guitars? 
In addition to the things in the description below, I will be going over 2 of my best tricks for getting my guitar accepted as cabin luggage - one that happens at check-in, and one that happens at boarding. Come check it out! 
Have you ever wondered how guitarists travel to faraway concert destinations with their expensive instruments? With travel opening back up in much of the world, it is high time to honor this user request and answer the question in today's livestream.
Having performed in over 350 concerts on 5 continents over the past two decades, tonebase instructor Mircea Gogoncea will be sharing advice from his own personal experience, as well as some of the tricks that have worked best for him.
This livestream will go over how to find cheap tickets for your concert tours, what to look for when buying airplane tickets, how to choose between airlines and other means of transportation, how to present your guitar at check-in and how to be accepted into the cabin with your guitar as hand luggage.
We are going to be using this thread to gather suggestions and questions!
- What questions do you have on this topic?
- Any particular area you would like me to focus on?
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Great live stream Mircea on traveling with the guitar. I have three high end guitars and at some point in two years or so might move to Europe from the US. Any suggestions on how to travel with 3 guitars?
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Sasha Hi Sasha! When it comes to moving countries, sending guitars via courier (like DHL, UPS, etc.) becomes a lot more feasible. Couriers are not inherently unsafe for your instrument, they are just impractical for regular travel, since they are a) slow; b) expensive; c) a hassle to pack.
But, since moving is not something you do every month or even every year, it's worth it. I would say, use a courier to send all three of them to Europe, and travel easy without even taking a single one as hand luggage.
Be prepared to pay a few hundred dollars for each package though. Moving continents is expensive - I speak from experience!
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I have a guitar with Brazilian Rosewood back and sides (at least I paid for Brazilian rosewood), with no SITES documentation. Is there risk of the guitar being seized if I travel internationally with it?
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John Mardinly Hi John! I addressed this briefly in the livestream, but basically, in my experience, this is not currently as big a problem as it used to be.
When I was juuust starting out with my travels, as a child and later teenager in the mid 2000s, I would occasionally have to provide documentation for the provenance of the instrument and type of wood - and I did have to do some convincing to be let through a few times.
That being said, I haven't been asked in over 10 years now, and I used to fly 40-100 times per year before Covid. Unless you are very unlucky, or you stand out as a traveler in some other way, I would say not to worry about it.
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Great and practical advice. Thank you.
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