Useless company, merely a middle man, quotes meaningless
Cameron
Submitted this review about
Americas-Moving-Services
Review made Live: 1/5/2012 10:06:00 PM
The first thing you should know is that AMS is merely a brokerage company, not a moving service. When you hire them, they merely serve as a middleman to hook you up with some other local company that you could have easily found in a phone book. When moving, there is absolutely no reason to hire such a service, unless you really want to waste a large deposit on top of the already expensive moving costs.
The second thing to know is that unless the estimate you've gotten explicitly says that it is legally binding, it is meaningless. This was our first move, and we did not know this. We went through an extensive inventory of our items with an estimator on the phone, and it seemed like a thorough and credible process. Once it was on the truck, however, the price almost doubled. I now know that this is a pretty common experience in moving. Never let anybody touch your items until you get a legally binding quote.
The third thing to know is that this company is extremely nice and easy to reach until you pay your deposit, after which they've gotten their cut of the move and they are done with the whole operation. Now the fate of your belongings is entirely in the hands of whatever moving company you've payed them hundreds of dollars to call for you. Once in the hands of the local moving company, AMS became worse than useless at helping is find information about our move and schedule our dropoff. We were travelling internationally in-between moves and required storage, and we were desperately trying to figure out the location of our belongings in storage and schedule a drop-off window between travels. It took 8 international phone calls and two supervisors before I finally gave up trying to call AMS entirely and got out of them the identity of the local moving company, A Better Way Movers, that had our belongings. We were finally able to establish that our items were still in storage in Indiana and schedule a dropoff window in Texas.
...we eventually discovered that one reason that we had such a hard time finding the location of our belongings is that they had been horribly damaged very soon after pickup. Apparently they had a large empty truck and had not properly strapped the items down, so everything breakable had been broken. A Better Way had been trying to replace some of the larger items like a glass table and several large lamps, and had apparently been stalling the transfer of the items to arrange this. AMS was happy to inform us that they were not responsible in any way for damages to our items--thanks again, useless middleman--and that we must take up claims with A Better Way.
...which was a complete disaster. They eventually replaced our table after months of wrangling. Most painfully, some art was damaged which could not be replaced. They offered to get the art repaired and reframed, but said that we should wait for them to find a suitable restoration company. 8 phone calls, uncountable e-mails, and 6 months later, and we are still waiting.
To reiterate, again, NEVER hire a brokerage company. Deal directly with a trustworthy company that will actually be responsible for your belongings. The long and short of it is that AMS will take hundreds of dollars to pick up a phone book to select a moving company at random, and occasionally tell you that they don't know anything about the status of your belongings.
Disastrous.
