Wow, thats pretty good. Now, to LBS's rent those cases out or is it worth buying one?

I bought mine $300+, used three times so far. So, $100 per use or so. Probably renting one is cheaper unless you fly/ship more than once or twice a year. But I bought it before renting was even an option. I've loaned it out to get some use out of it. But man, just a few trips and it is beat to hell. It does it's job.

I rented a case from the LBS for $5/day (brand new one too). Paid $50 each way to fly from Denver to Boise on Frontier airlines, it was the cheapest airline I could find for shipping bike. I packed it up at home, followed an article in an old Bicycle Magazine. Had to buy a pedal wrench ($10), but that was it. used old t-shirts to wrap the contact points on the bike and give it extra padding. Both airports allowed me to watch as they opened up the case to inspect it and then allowed me to use zip ties on the locks. Got advice against using a lock b/c if they do need to open the case they can destroy it trying to get into it with bolt cutters. Overall cost was $135 for shipping and case rental, plus time spent to assemble/disassemble. Bike came through unharmed.

IMO, in the photos using the Trico "clamshell" case on the bikesport site, they show the fork in line with the bike in straight position. I would not do this, and have always laid the fork flat on the foam and have the stem twisted 180 degrees back towards the seatpost, and the fork 90 degrees from straight-forward position to lay flat, no reason to leave it in regular position and risk getting it crushed. I ride a bigger frame and am still able to fit it all and lay it flat, just my advice, hope it makes sense.

Sounds good. I live in DT MPLS, where are you? Shoot, I'll buy you 2 beers!

Even though everything worked out fine for us, it was still a tremendous pain. The fee each way was $80 for each one, $100 if you call on a different day. The person who checked us in for the way home didn't get either memo, so we didn't pay on the way home. :) And they didn't make it onto our domestic connecting flight so they were delivered to our door later that night. Most people with late luggage were irate. We were happy that someone else would be doing the heavy lifting (and our car is not ideal for big bulky items).

For the fork/dropout protectors mentioned in that link, we used appropriate lengths from some PVC pipe we had lying around.

We brought plenty of good chocolate back for the people who lent us their boxes, and also gave them a gift certificate for bike stuff.

I shipped two bikes with UPS from OH to TX (I shipped to the hotel, and made sure they would receive it - I double checked when I arrived at the hotel and even said they could put the bikes into my room when they came so the hotel shouldn't store the bikes in the reception). I packed both bikes into card board boxes, because the guy I bought the bike of told me that was the way they received the bikes, so they should be able to survive in such a box. My new bike was padded with bubble plast and foam and a couple of towels. I don't think it got any scrapes at all. My other bike (which is older and cheaper) was packed into the box with as much extra cardboxes around the bike as possible. Nothing happened to it (other than the box itself broke in one of the handles). I felt pretty good about the bike with the foam and bubble plast, while I wouldn't pack a bike in card-box pieces again if possible.
I'll ship both bikes home in a couple of weeks, and I hope both of them will be fine then, too. I'll probably ship with UPS again.

When I did use UPS I made sure to give it a buffer of days on arrival -- shipping companies have never been great at time estimates since something always seems to happen.