MOVING TO NEW YORK, DAY 1
As you can just imagine, it’s not my life if there isn’t drama.
Today’s drama: our moving truck didn’t show up.
Our cross-country moving is for a great start.
First I get life-threatening blood clots, and road-tripping is limited to less hours a day with stops every two hours.
Now: we don’t have a moving company to move our things, and we should be leaving in three days.
We originally started looking for moving companies for our cross-country move from Colorado to New York back in April and used a moving website to get quotas from different moving companies. Several moving companies contacted us, but Ultimate Van Lines was by far the cheapest company we found, and we were planning on choosing them as soon as we found out for sure we were moving.
The Ultimate Van Lines moving expert Eli kept calling and calling to us and finally on May 24th he even lowered the price for us to get the contract. Talk about good follow through! On May 24th, we paid 10% deposit for the Ultimate Van Lines moving company and agreed on a moving date of July 11th.
We are not quite new to moving and have heard and experienced some moving horros ourselves, so we called the Ultimate Van Lines rep Eli on Monday and again this morning asking everything was still set up for the move. Eli was very nice and co-operative again, and said everything was a OK for the move, and said this morning our moving truck was on the way. He specifically even said he had the dispatch information, and the truck was on its way.
Ten o’clock went by, eleven o’clock went by. Then it was noon.
No moving truck in sight.
We do live on the mountains, so we thought maybe the movers were just lost, or had estimated the driving time wrong, we don’t have big highways here at the Rockies.
Finally we got the information.
James from Ultimate Van Lines called and said the rate was wrong, price the sales rep quoted us was too low and they had to charge us more. We said it’s OK, we’ll pay for the extra, we just needed our damn moving truck. (Matt of course didn’t say “damn”, I added it up.) Hello? What other options we had?
They called us back a few minutes later. There was no moving truck coming. The move was cancelled in the system because the price the sales rep quoted us was too low. Maybe they thought we wouldn’t pay for the extra. Who knows.
We found out about this three hours after the movers should have already been here. GRRREAT.
My husband is panicking, I’m on no-stress prescribtion by doctors. I guess we want to give Ultimate Van Lines a chance to fix the big mess they caused, but it is beyond my understanding how this can happen, and how we still got an answer ”your moving truck is on its way” this morning. Or of course I understand how – it’s called ”not telling the truth to keep your customer happy”, adapted in various businesses across the country.
I want to say that everybody makes mistakes and I want to be understanding.
This is a huge mistake from Ultimate van Lines, but ultimately the way they handle everything for now on is how I judge this moving company. And believe me, I will let you know, and will make sure my blog post about Ultimate Van Lines moving company is somewhat search engine optimized… so you know, just in case when someone else, like you, is looking for a moving company, they can read about our experience with Ultimate Van Lines.
UPDATE July 11 at 6 PM.
The Ultimate Van Lines moving company from Dallas was not able to get us another moving truck for next week.
We had also made one crucial mistake choosing our moving company: we hadn’t done our research (note: trying to be diplomatic here, but it was my husband who contracted the Ultimate van Lines :).
I found a few interesting blog posts about Ultimate Van Lines, and after reading more and more, I am actually very pleased that Ultimate Van Lines moving truck didn’t show up today. I learnt the company is keeping people’s belongings as “hostage” and asking more money just to deliver and unload the truck. I mean hundreads of dollars more than the original price quota. Also a scary thing: one of the company’s movers was trying to rape a woman, who he was helping to move! How horrible is that?
If you want to learn more about Ultimate Van Lines moving company, you might find these posts interesting:
– “Door to Door Vanlines – Ultimate Van Lines – weight discrepancies!” at Moving Scam
– “Report: Ultimate Van Lines” at Ripp Off Report
– “Ultimate Van Lines Holds Belongings Hostage” at Consumerist
– “Ultimate van Lines of Dallas, TX” at Moving Company Reviews
It’s July, they busiest moving time of the year, and most places we called today said it takes 3-4 weeks to get us a moving truck here.
Matt was on phone for hours and I was online finding more places to call. Thank God my internet addiction, we hadn’t cut off our internet yet.
Our solution was calling to ABF Freight System Inc. who offers inexpensive and safe moving service called U-Pack. They bring a huge trailer and you pack it yourself and they’ll pick it up a few days later and deliver it for you. Yes, a lot of work, and if you are not a seasoned mover like we are, I probably wouldn’t recommend it. But we have moved so many times and had so many treasures broken, that we packed everything ourselves anyway.
We will have one of the ABF trailers coming next week, and we’re hoping we’ll get some help loading the truck. Wish us luck, maybe this time we’ll actually get it done.
