Allied Van Lines

Kevin and his crew (Eric & brother) were great! Nothing was broken or damaged. They unloaded the truck quickly & put things together as well. It was 100 degrees out & it didn’t slow them down one bit. I would highly recommend them. The office was a bit slow at times responding to emails! I was given Kevin’s cell phone & he promptly relied. They were done in 90 minutes, I was totally impressed.

Could not / would not provide any details of when my goods would be delivered. Answers were very vague!

I moved from Boston (Methuen) to Tampa (Land O Lakes) with Allied Van Lines/ABC Moving and Storage (Leominster, MA). I have mixed feelings about the move with respect to the moving company's performance. Our initial impressions were very positive based on our experience with the estimator (Alistair Drummond). He refined the quote several times as we become more clear about what we were taking and what we were leaving behind.

The start of the moving process itself was ok, though the communication could have been much better. We had been told that the loading was likely to occur on Tuesday, July 5, but this was not confirmed until Tuesday morning when the driver called to say that he was on his way. That's unacceptably poor communications (it's not the driver's fault, it's an account management issue).

The day of loading, we had three people loading the truck. Two of the guys were great; they worked hard and never slacked. The third guy, Anthony, was a slacker. He was often lollygagging and playing with his phone. As a result, the loading process took about 1-1/2 hours longer than necessary, in my estimation. That also put us into Boston rush hour traffic when we started our drive south. Not that big of an issue, but it didn't need to happen that way.

The communication was once again poor on the delivery end of the move. We received an email on July 11 saying that our tentative delivery/unloading date was Monday, July 18. Between those days we had no further communication in spite of multiple attempts with email and phone messages to get confirmation of the July 18 unloading date. On Sunday evening, July 17, the driver called to say he'd be there in the morning at 8am. He arrived the following morning at 9:30am.

On the unloading end, we again had three guys from the moving company (including the driver). Two of them worked very hard to get us unloaded as quickly as possible. The driver was often nowhere to be seen... not sure where he was spending his time, but the workers made it clear that they thought he was being lazy. In any case, all of our items did arrive with nothing missing.

We have a nice decorative desk with wooden legs which was the only item damaged in the move. The damage, however, was extensive, in that the rear legs of the desk were snapped off. When the desk was packed, the legs should have been removed to prevent damage, but that was not done. To be fair, as I said, all other items arrived intact without damage, including 61 boxes that we had packed ourselves.

All in all, the move was successful and reasonably priced. The damage to the desk should not have happened, but I'm happy that that was the only damage to our items. My biggest complaint is with the overall communications from ABC Moving and Storage. Moving a household is a very stressful time; a few simple improvements to how we were communicated with would have significantly helped to reduce our stress level.