I am stressing myself out!  We booked our flights to Lyon and home from Nice thinking it would be an easy thing to ship our empty, collapsed, bike cases from Lyon to our hotel near the Nice airport, which has agreed to receive and store them.  But how to ship them?  Every shipper I can find online has a maximum dimension limit of less than the 125 cm of our cases.  Surely larger packages can be shipped in France?

It was so easy in Florence!  We just rolled them into the Mailboxes Etc. outlet, provided the destination address (our hotel near the Venice airport), and paid ~80€.  We knew in advance that this was do-able, having contacted the MBE outlet online in advance.

This time, however, I cannot find any solution.  We'd really rather not have to pay the fees and change our flights, or give up our last couple of days on the beach, then sit on trains for a day...

Any suggestions?  Or can anyone actually living in France and find out what the deal is?  After all, how do bicycles or skis get shipped to shops or online customers?

Interesting conundrum.  

I found this site recommended by a skier. It suggests that DHL might be the only option.  And it's expensive! I entered estimated dimensions and a weight of 22 kg.  

https://shipping.boxtal.com/fr...

You've probably already found this site that lists a few options:   https://www.freewheelingfrance...  

I tried all the options on Freewheeling France, but all had a size limit or ship only to or from France, not within the country.  However, it seems UPS can do it.  Why I kept hitting a size limit before I don't know, but this time I got all the way through the "create a shipment" form to where I could actually schedule a pickup.

Hi Jacquie -

I found this site: https://www.eurosender.com/

Can you make that work?  We’re in transit at the moment but will be back in France tomorrow.  I can try to do some more research.

I know that Mondial Relay and La Poste ship bicycles, so shipping these cases should be possible somehow.  I have to admit, though, that I’ve never actually shipped a bike with them.  So it’s all theory to me.

When will you be in Lyon and when do you need the cases in Nice?

And do those cases fold?  They look pretty long and narrow.  Are they bike cases?

Eurosender might work!  At least, alarms didn't go off when I entered the package sizes.

We arrive in Lyon on May 20 and need to pack our bikes at our airport hotel in Nice (actually, Saint Laurent du Var) on June 29 for our flight home on June 30.

The bike cases are semi-rigid and fold down for storage (important when you live in small spaces) or shipping.

 You can see the rigid  base of the case at the bottom in the top photo.  That's where the 125 x 40 dimensions come from.  The corrugated plastic side stiffeners get removed from their sleeves and folded to collapse the case to about 30 cm high.  We have storage covers to keep everything compact and together for storage or  shipping, as shown in the photo I included in my first post.  

Hi Jacquie -

I'm back home.

Here's another possibility.  https://colisport.fr/

They appear to ship bikes, and the site didn't barf when I used dimensions of 125x40x20. 

Chronopost also appears to ship larger packages.     From their site:

Pour l’envoi de colis volumineux, les dimensions maximales sont :

• L = 150 cm
• L + 2H + 2l = 300 cm

I think you're looking at what most of the mailing companies would call a "colis volumineux".  Sometimes that's a different web page than the one for sending basic, small boxes.  Maybe that's what's causing the trouble?

Let me know if you have more specific questions and I'll try to research a bit more.

Thanks, Rich.  It seems that there are three categories and colis volumineux is the one hiding in the shadows.  The others seem to be small parcels (easy) and commercial cargo.

I have a preferred plan and a couple of backup plans, having discovered that MBE doesn't offer the same service in France as it does in Italy (apparently it's an American-Italian company).  It seems that anything we ship needs to be in a box (no company seems to offer packing), so obtaining boxes is the first part of any plan.  Boxes of the specific size to fit our bike cases aren't available and we don't want to run around trying to find boxes, so the plan is to order some online through laposte.com to be delivered to our hotel, which has agreed to receive the package.  We will bring packing tape and jury-rig three boxes of appropriate cross-section for each case (each end and one in the middle).  The cases have a rigid base (125 x 40) so this should work.

Ideally, we will be able to roll our unboxed cases to the Post Office, carry the boxes and tape along, and enclose them there.  This hinges on the Post Office accepting packages of this size.  I'm assuming they could do the paperwork and payment there.

The other plan is to schedule a pickup at our hotel, which might require us to hang around waiting for the courier.  I think the hotel we've booked has a staffed reception desk during the day; I've emailed them to ask.  We could, of course, change our booking.  Or we could somehow get the cases to a dropoff/pickup point near our hotel.  When I look online, these appear to be small shops and I don't know if they would accept oversize packages, nor have the space for us to box them up.  They are pretty easy to move around with their handles and wheels, but awkward to carry any distance in boxes.

So my questions are:  does the Post Office accept large packages?  If not, how can I tell if the little service shops will accept large packages?

Hi Jacquie -

I should start off with the disclaimer that this is France, and it's impossible to predict who you're going to run into when you try to ship the packages.  Your results could well depend on the kind of day the person in the post office is having, or the kind of person they are.  Sad, but in my experience very true.

I've never shipped anything with the dimensions of your bike cases, but my assumption would be that if that they will sell you boxes that big, then they should accept the boxes for shipment at pretty much any "real" post office.  Their web site claims that they'll take boxes up to 200x200x200, so I assume that you won't overwhelm their system by showing up with a box of the size you’re trying to ship.  I'd avoid the postal offices you mentioned that are wedged inside stores - I think they're called "relays".

That said, I would recommend trying to make it work with a shipment service.  La Poste is not staffed with the most go-getter types of people.  It's pretty difficult to get questions answered, and the staff there generally don’t go out of their way to be helpful.  Just my experience.

FWIW I went through their website to see what would happen if I shipped a box 125x40x40 of 5kg from my address to Lyon and I got a message "Oups ! Aucune offre ne correspond à vos attentes".  I'm not sure what's going on there, but that doesn't give me confidence...

Here are some other options I found:

SNCF Baggage (another business staffed with low achievers if not idiots):  

https://mesbagages.sncf-connect.com/#/

Bring4You (some kind of Uber-delivery kind of thing):  

https://bring4you.com/create

Chronopost: 

https://www.chronopost.fr/fr/particulier/envoyer-un-colis/envoyer-un-gros-colis#/step-home

Chronopost is actually La Poste with cooler uniforms, as far as I can tell.  But they claim they’ll handle large packages, and drop-off is in a post office.  They’ll deliver to a street address.  That looks like a good option to me.

I think whatever you do, you should count on spending at least a day getting your boxes where they need to go or waiting around for a pickup.  Some taxi or metro rides with boxes might be required to find the right place to drop them off.

I wish it were easier than that.  But in my experience, it’s not.

Rich