snapdad said:
I would be very interested in hearing about the positives and negatives. I've actually never heard of this service before, and I'm thinking seriously about doing it. Taking gas into account, the price actually seems cheaper than the rental truck quotes I've received from Budget, U-Haul, etc.
All right, here goes. First off, this is how it worked when we did it (different company, so things might be slightly different, but I think the basics will be the same):
- You schedule the pick-up. A truck with a big trailer comes and you fill it up.
- This truck drops your trailer off at a local storage facility.
- A different moving truck moves your trailer cross-country and drops it off at another storage facility near where you're moving to.
- You schedule a delivery time. A truck picks up your trailer from the storage facility, brings it to your place, and you empty it out.
Negatives:
- If you live in a big city, the whole process can be a real pain since the logistics of parking a huge truck on a busy city street can be difficult. In our case, the police came multiple times due to complaints from neighbors and other drivers, which caused lots of problems. For this reason alone, we won't be using a company like this now since it would be physically impossible to fit one of their trailers anywhere around the place we live now for an extended period of time.
- Lots of the "local" aspects are contracted out to whatever local company will work for them cheaply in the areas that your moving from/to. This can mean shoddy service, since the local companies don't always have all of the information they should. The guy who was supposed to bring the trailer to our new apartment didn't show up when he was supposed to, and neither us nor the company could get in contact with anyone from the storage facility for a full week. Finally, they gave us the option of either waiting another week for them to drop it off (which would have meant two full weeks with an empty apartment), or renting a U-Haul and getting our stuff from the storage facility ourselves. The money for the U-Haul was reimbursed, but obviously the uncertainty of not knowing where our stuff was and then having to go to a storage facility and drag everything out of the trailer was not an ideal situation. As another example, the truck driver they contracted to pick-up the trailer from us kept picking fights with anyone who complained about his truck, including the police (needless to say, this didn't help the situation and we ended up spending almost as much time acting as mediators than we did loading up the trailer).
Obviously this all hinges on how dependable the local companies that they hire are, but just realize that lots of unforeseen problems can come up. From the UPack website, it looks like they're pretty professional and accountable about things, but prepare yourself for the worst.
Positives:
- Much cheaper than any other option we could find.
- We were able to fly out to our new place rather than driving cross-country and staying in hotels, paying for gas, etc.
- Assuming the scheduling works out (i.e. no major problems like we had), it's a little bit more flexible than renting a moving truck. Since students tend to move in bunches, it can get tough to find a moving truck if you're going during a "peak" time. The self-packing didn't have the same problem, if for no other reason than not nearly as many people know it about it as opposed to U-Haul, Budget, etc.
- Much cheaper than any other option we could find.
- Much cheaper than any other option we could find.
😉
