Hi Adam:

You are going to encounter those kind of 'port' charges no matter what you ship or how you ship it. You could be shipping a ham sandwich from America to Europe, get a great deal on the freight (only $2.50 air freight for the ham sandwich), and you will still get nailed for a couple of hundred bucks of port charges at the other end (warehousing the ham sandwich for 3 hours, inspection fees, etc.)

I've shipped my moto (a ST1100) from Canada to Europe several times, mostly by air but once by ship, and there is really no way to avoid those port charges. You need to consider them to be a 'tax' of sorts that is levied by the port of arrival.

You might be able to minimize port charges by shipping through a freight forwarder who has more involvement in the process at each end (rather than dealing with the carrier alone, whose involvement is limited to when the shipment passes over the ship's rail at each end of the journey), but you won't be able to avoid them entirely no matter what you do.

By example: Last time I shipped my moto by air from Canada to Paris, I was a passenger upstairs on the same aircraft. The plane landed at 6:00 AM, I picked the moto up at the freight office at 8:00 AM, and was on the road at 8:30 AM the same day. But I still got hit with port charges of about $250, of which the biggest component was 'warehousing' (storage) for the 30 minutes that the bike was in the freight shed between unloading from the aircraft and the time I picked it up a few minutes later.

Michael