A long flight and a new country disturb a cat's sense of place far more than a house move within one town. Her smells, her sounds, her daylight pattern and even the water taste different, so the first week is not about exploring the whole home; it is about proving, in a small controlled space, that meals, rest and company still arrive in the order she trusts.
One Base Room, Familiar Things First
Set up a single room before she leaves her carrier: litter tray in a quiet corner, food and water placed apart from it, a scratching post, a hiding place, and her own bedding and a worn item of your clothing unpacked ahead of everything else in the house. Keep her indoors for the whole settling period, however keen she seems at windows, because she has no mental map of the streets outside and a door slipped in week one can mean a lost cat in an unfamiliar country. Open further rooms one at a time over following days, and only once she is eating, toileting and resting openly in the rooms she already has.
Shifting the Clock Without Breaking It
Cats run on light, hunger and habit, and travel scrambles all three. Keep the sequence of her day in its old order, morning feed, play, rest, evening feed, settled night, while easing the actual times toward local time across several days rather than moving every anchor at once. Expect her to sleep at odd hours, eat cautiously at first and hide more than usual, and keep your own behaviour calm and predictable around her while your body clock settles too. Familiar food matters here: serve what she ate before the move for the first week if you can, and change diet later, separately, once place and routine are no longer new.
Paperwork to Settle Alongside the Routine
Keep the documents the move generated in one folder kept with your own travel records: the airline or carrier paperwork, import or border documents where they were issued, her vaccination record and a written copy of her microchip number with the name of its registry beside it.
Outdoor Access Comes Much Later
Resist letting her explore outside during the first week, however settled she seems indoors and however she asks at doors. A relocated cat let out early orients to streets, smells and sounds she has not mapped, and a startle can carry her a long way from a home she cannot yet find again. Once indoor life is fully settled and your vet is content, any outdoor introduction belongs in a later stage, supervised, brief and attached to the house by harness or a secured garden, treated as a new project rather than as the finishing touch of moving week.
Chip Record and Local Vet in Week One
A microchip scan gives a finder or a vet the chip number only; that number points to the registry that enrolled it, and the registry is where the contact record lives. Update her details with that registry itself, giving your new address and a phone number that works in the new country, then read the saved record back rather than trusting a submitted form, because the reunion the chip promises depends on the registry holding current details when a scan happens. Updating an engraved tag, a vet file or a QR profile does not alter the registry record; each is a separate layer, and the registry layer is the one a distant finder reaches. Register her with a local vet during the first week as well, taking her travel documents, vaccination paperwork and chip number along, so the practice holds her history before any urgent need arises and can confirm her chip reads where expected. Pet Passport, carried within KinsLe as a single records packet, holds the travel and health documents a first-week vet visit abroad usually requires you to produce.