You could do a lot better - Low Quote Attractive but not held up.
Jonathan Banks
Submitted this review about
LIGHTNING VANLINES
Review made Live: 1/18/2010 11:21:00 PM
My girlfriend and I relocated from Santa Barbara to Virginia. I thought I did a lot of research and found some positive reviews for this company and we chose them because their estimate was very low. We are not professional movers and I am assuming if you are reading this you aren't either. When the mover arrived he underestimated the amount of our load by a significant amount. In a way, not the company's fault but we tried to explain what we items we had to the best of our ability and the person quoting us on the phone didn't help us much in coming up with a realistic estimate.
When actually packing the contract states that they will wrap your items in blankets. Be very careful because that is not what needs to be done. You need to bubble wrap everything and pack them into boxes very solidly, because your items are going to be loaded and unloaded a couple times. A TV for example needs to be wrapped in a blanket or significant amount of bubble wrap then boxed up in order for Lighting to assume responsibility, so basically they insist that you pack your items this was. In short you need to spend a significant amount of time packing your items before you have them pick them up (Boxed Mattresses, Boxed paintings & mirrors, boxed everything). We thought we did a good job and thought when the company wrapped the items in blankets that would be enough. Our experience is moving across town and that is what you need to do. This is not the case, it is necessary to package the items exceptionally well. Be careful, if Lightning does it for you, you will be charged very high fees, for example putting a Mattress in a box was about $75. All in all we were charged about $900 to pack. Once again not exactly Lightning's fault, but the fees were pretty ridiculous.
Working with the driver proved frustrating as well. They promised the items on Sunday then moved it to Monday, OK fine, it was still under the 14 days promised. Then on Monday there were more delays and instead of showing up between 11:30am & 3:00pm as promised they showed up around 7:00pm - it's cold and dark in Virginia and not exactly how you want to spend your day, waiting is not fun. We live in a large apartment building so there were extra charges for the walk to the apartment, they do 50ft for free - 50 feet is NOT a long distance), then charge an additional $75 for each additional 50ft. Once again, it's in the contract so we should have known, but the 200ft walk cost us another $225 cash - so we added a trip to the ATM before they started unloading the truck.
Most of our stuff made it OK, so the packing was necessary. A couple things that were just wrapped in blankets were broken, but nothing major. We helped them unwrap the items because it was getting late, but the guys were OK helping out. We finally finished at 10:30 pm and at that point we had to deal with all the trash. They were willing to bring it downstairs but not dispose of it. I am not sure how many of you have dumpsters so keep this in mind.
All in all not a disaster but I would encourage you to look around and make sure you don't make the same mistakes we did.
Good luck
