It is important for the costumer to realize up front that this is a brokering company. They will contract the lowest bidder to move your things. They also want to be paid for there services. Trust them at your own risk. The price they commit to will not be the price that you pay in the end. We highly recommend that you go directly to a moving company that is a B+ or higher with the Better Business Bureau. This is why...
We were contracted to Victory Van Lines through Nationwide Relocation Services (a.k.a. Moving Cost), for the move of a two-bedroom apartment. If you scan the reviews of this company online, you will quickly notice the formula they use to convince you to pay unnecessary amounts of money to them only to find out that you haven't even begun to pay for your move. My primary contact person was Rocky Maldonado, though we were shuffled to so many people throughout the process that we lost track of who we were supposed to be talking to. This company has numerous employees who are mysteriously unavailable when you need to speak with one. After providing an inventory, our original "binding" estimate was $1945. we quickly noticed that 40 boxes of books (among other boxes) that we had listed in the inventory were not present on the inventory used to determine our estimated weight for the binding estimate. This should have been clue #1.
We called Rocky several times about this, and he reassured us that his calculations overestimated the weight on all items on the list and that the 40 boxes of books would be well within the estimated weight. we paid the company a deposit of approimately $1000.
One week before the move, when our moving plans were no longer flexible, we began receiving frantic calls from both Rocky and other sales representatives regarding our inventory. They were worried that my inventory did not list the number of boxes in our cargo accurately, and they wanted to "update" the estimate. We had already had this conversation with Rocky three months before. Why wasn't this an issue then? In retrospect, they must have either realized they could not contract us out to any company at $1945 and still get paid. To be secure in our inventory, knowing that we did have 40 boxes of books that were unaccounted for, we agreed to additional payment to a total $1806.91 in deposits. the representative reassured me this is just to be safe and that we would be reimbursed if our cargo weight was less than the this estimate. They all claimed an expectation, given our inventory, that this would be the case.
After the move, we received the final balance from Victory Van Lines. They required that we pay them an additional $2500 dollars on top of what we had already paid to Nationwide for a grand total of $4306.97. We had exceeded the weight in the estimate by about 150 pounds. a mistake by Victory Van Lines resulted in a reimbursement $412 for a final moving cost of $3884.17. (Victory Van Lines is also reviewed by us on this website). The final moving cost was nearly $2000 more than the original binding estimate.
Our experience in combination with those documented by other online reviews indicates that the method Nationwide Relocation Services uses to calculate weight grossly underestimates the actual weight of the customer's cargo. This is to their financial benefit. This was for a two bedroom apartment with 40 boxes of books. In hindsight, we should have moved ourselves or gone directly to a more reputable company.
