I'm visiting New York soon and I wonder what the rules are when buying DVD's there and bringing them to Holland with me. Does anyone know how many DVD's I'm allowed to buy and bring with me and how much taxes I have to pay and stuff like that at the airport?
Personally, I would dump the DVD cases, keep the sleeves apart from the DVD's and put the DVD's into some type of a CD carrying case, label side facing down(so they look just like CD's). If anyone asks, you brought them with you when you came here. I'd probably bring a few CD's into the states with me to mix with the DVD's.
If you're coming here for any business, even better. A friend of mine went to Europe on business and brought some documents stored on CD's. He had one of those plastic cases with a spindle and a clear top. When he came home, DVD's were mixed in with the CD's and the sleeves were in folders mixed with business papers.
Last time I went overseas I bought a bunch of console games (PS2 and Gamecube). I posted the empty DVD cases home (and only because of the special design of GC "dvd" cases, and like Bill suggested, put the covers in amongst papers/magazines other junk in my pack, and put the discs inside my CD holder amongst my music CDs.
No problem at all!
As for taxes etc, I'd assume you'd have to pay those on arrival back in Holland rather then the USA, so you may want to ring up Dutch Customs and ask them what you can bring in and to what values. Worth doing since I assume you'll also be buying something from the US besides porn DVDs...
Surely if you've got the discs and covers all stashed away among your other paperwork and CDs, then the customs people aren't going to see them and you won't need to pay any import taxes either.
The idea of buying a spindle of 100 blank CD-Rs and hiding DVDs in there is a good one.
Some info for travellers here suggests pretty much any amount of goods under 250Euros is okay, but I presume it would be better for you to read the Dutch Customs site, which I can't! Hope this is useful. I'd imagine that it's only the import duty on goods from outside the EU when you return to the Netherlands that you need to worry about, but that's just speculation on my part.
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nudity Deactivated User
168 Posts 9/02
Posted - Jul 15 2003 : 10:50PM
You can import goods freely as long as the total amount does not exceed 175 euro.
Once the 175 euro is reached, you pay the full tax (VAT) and import duties over all extra goods you import.
I would estimate that on DVDs the tax+duties is about 20 %.