Funero vs Homeland International

Homeland International publish three price bands: £3,000 to £5,000 to send someone abroad from the UK, £2,750 to £8,500 to bring someone back, and £1,595 to £3,850 for ashes.

The difficulty is what a band can actually tell you. £2,750 to £8,500 is a spread of £5,750, and which end of it you are standing at is the one thing you need to know. A range wide enough to be true of every country is too wide to budget against for yours.

One price for your own case, itemised

We cost the route in front of us rather than the whole market. The figure is all-inclusive and it arrives broken down: the preparation, the coffin, the flight, the documents, the consular fees and the coordination, each on its own line, so you can see which part is the expensive one.

It is free, it takes about ten minutes, and what comes back is a number rather than a band. If the figure is more than you were expecting, you have lost nothing by asking and there is nothing to sign.

We will not claim to be the cheapest, because until we know where your loved one is neither of us can say that honestly. What we will say is that the figure we quote is the figure you pay, and that if something genuinely moves you hear it from us while it is happening rather than at the end.

You will not need to fly out, or post anything abroad

There is a chain of offices between a death abroad and a flight home: a doctor, a local registrar, a mortuary, a consulate, an airline. Each wants a particular document, in its own language, in its own order, and none of them explains the next step.

We deal with the whole chain, in the local language, and assemble the paperwork here. You will not be asked to travel, to sit in a foreign register office, or to post original certificates to another country.

Check the insurance before you pay for anything

Before you plan around any figure, find out whether it is already covered. Many travel policies include repatriation, and some life insurance policies and funeral plans do too, though plenty do not and the wording is rarely obvious.

We will read the policy with you and handle the claim, so you only pay for whatever the insurer does not. There is no charge for it, and it is the thing families most often discover far too late.

What we do while your loved one is in our care

We arrange the washing and the embalming, and restore a natural, peaceful appearance. Your loved one travels in a coffin built for the route, by road in a specialist vehicle or in the hold of a scheduled flight, under the airline's own repatriation procedures.

Nobody travels on a passport once they have died. The country where the death happened issues transit papers instead, in its own format and on its own timetable, and a single one of those in the wrong form is what holds a return up for a week.

What happens once they are home

We meet the aircraft, oversee the transfer, and hand your loved one to whichever funeral director you choose, anywhere in the UK. Where a cremation follows, the coroner has to authorise it first, and we take care of that so the booking holds.

The death does not need registering again here. It can be recorded with the General Register Office if you would like a UK record of it, and we will say whether that is worth doing for you.

If what you actually want is a direct cremation in the UK, we arrange those ourselves for a fixed £1,295. One fixed figure rather than a range, covering the whole service.

The same team, at any hour

The same specialists take your case from the first call to the last document, reachable directly, and you are never asked to explain what happened again to somebody new.

A person answers at any hour, on every day of the year. Most first calls reach us at night, because that is when the call from abroad usually comes, and that call is free.