Stolen Mattress, Terrible Communication
Michael
Submitted this review about
Virgin Van Lines
Review made Live: 4/1/2014 11:36:00 AM
I absolutely DO NOT recommend working with this company under any circumstance. Read this review and save yourself the money, the headaches and the lost items. The other reviews are 100% correct and we sincerely are trying to save you the experience that we’ve already been through.
For starters, my wife and I were moving to Houston from Sacramento and our move date was June 30. I got a call the day before the move to see if I could move the date to July 1 because they absolutely wouldn’t be able to make it on the 30th. Reluctantly, I complied. They then showed up 2 hours late on July 1.
During the move, the movers stacked boxes too tall outside of the truck and they eventually fell over. A box spring, standing upright in the street also fell over and was damaged. At this point, I saw some loose pieces in the truck that turned out to be part of a bed frame and a futon. If I didn’t get in the truck and pick them up myself, they probably wouldn’t have made the trip to my place in Texas. A cabinet was also completely damaged upon the load-in to the truck.
After everything was loaded in, the price of our estimate more than doubled with a not very scientific guesstimate of cubic footage by the lead mover. All of our items were packed into the truck and we assumed were on the way to Texas.
Mary, the woman who secured my business, told me that our belongings would be in Texas in 4-14 days. That seemed reasonable to me. After inquiring when our belongings were going to arrive, I was told around July 18 and then around July 23. After 14 days had passed with no delivery or update, both days came and went. On July 24, I got in touch with the dispatcher/manager Danny and he told me that my belongings had not even left California. For 23 days, our things sat in some warehouse and no one told me.
After July 24, I reached out daily to Danny to figure out when my things would arrive in Texas or at least be on the road en route. Danny rarely answered the phone and rarely returned phone calls when he said he would.
On August 5, Danny said our things would be in Houston on August 8. They eventually showed up on August 10, but our king size TempurPedic mattress was missing. Alan, who unloaded the truck in Houston, signed a document saying the mattress was missing but later told Danny that he had delivered the mattress.
From August 10 until September 5, I went back and forth with Danny, Shawn (the guy who loaded the truck in Sacramento) and Alan (the guy who unloaded the truck in Houston) to figure out where the biggest item we owned had vanished. No one had an answer and the three began to pass blame to each other. They eventually stopped answering my phone calls.
On to the claims process. We filed a claim for the stolen mattress through MovingClaims.net which we were told would be a 30-120 day process. We filled out all of the necessary paperwork for missing items (mattress, plastic bin of about $500 worth of books) and thought we had a pretty good chance of being reimbursed. Finally, on December 12, we got an email saying that we had been awarded $148.00 for our missing/stolen items. Based on receipts, we estimated the cost of the items to be $3300.
In Summary, Virgin Van Lines arrived over 24 hours late to pick up our stuff, broke our things while loading them, charged us an additional $1150 more than the $1950 estimate, delivered our belongings in the ridiculous span of 41 days, and stole our most costly possession (a brand new mattress). Throughout the process they demonstrated a complete and utter lack of concern for the service they said they would provide us by rarely even answering the phone. In hindsight, we should have stopped the process on July 1st when they broke our belongings as they loaded them. For that we will have to take the lessons learned. But our hope is that this review will prevent everyone else in the country from signing up to use Virgin Van Lines in the future.
