International Van Lines

I thought that hiring IVL was a no brainer but unfortunately found out otherwise. During the whole move I never dealt with anyone from IVL, always used contractors. I think they are a broker and not a mover. The people unloading my things were day laborers hired from Craigslist. I had "IVL" pack all my items and despite this they broke many items, 3 items in one box alone. Do yourself a favor, look elsewhere, this company does not deserve all the plaudits they have received.

Move size: 3 Bedroom Home Service cost: $8000

I used IVL after reading some reviews that seemed positive, now I realize all the positive reviews were likely paid reviews. IVL promised a price and date for my move from Chicago to Las Vegas which was all handled professionally, but that's where the positive experience ends.

- When they are looking to sign you up, they'll say anything to get the contract. Jeremy claimed they don't use subcontractors for delivery, and if you read through some reviews, you'll realize they basically only use subcontractors. On driver who made the delivery said I needed to pay cash or get a money order to his trucking company as it was contracted out to him.

- IVL packed my furniture as per the agreement so they took apart some of the furniture and packed the parts and said they would put it back together on delivery. But on delivery, the driver was adamant on not doing that even after I showed him the paperwork that showed, it was promised unless I paid him more money to do it. This turned out to be a moot point as all the parts for my furniture was lost during the delivery. Now I'm left with over 20k in furniture without parts to put it back together. Seems they also lost some other boxes along the way.

- As things were getting unpacked, I noticed that most of the heavy furniture was dinged. Also a $1200 end table was smashed into pieces and a $5k dining table's base was cracked and will no longer sit level. So I started the claims process which really made me upset. IVL said they were sorry and wanted to offer $400 as compensation, if I waive the claims process and not write any negative reviews about my experience.

I obviously did not that the "deal", as I think it's more important for me to warn other prospective movers to avoid IVL. At the end of the day saving a thousand dollars for the moving cost will end up costing you 5x the saving once factoring in the broken/missing things from your move.

Move size: 2 Bedroom Home Service cost: $9672

DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME OR MONEY - This company is a scam. They will pick up your items, take your money then dodge your calls and emails when you ask for updates on where your items are.

I hired them to move my household items from Florida to New York. They ensured me it would take 7-10 days to arrive, but that they cannot guarantee a for sure date, so to assume it would take at most 10 days. They never ONCE specified business days in any conversations I had prior to pickup of my items. They picked up my items on Monday October 24th. It's Monday November 7th (15 days), and I have not received my items and now their dispatch staff are not only being incredibly disrespectful to me by not allowing me to speak when on a call with them, but have even hung up the phone on me and refuse to take any of my calls. I still have not received my items.

They picked up my items on Monday October 24th. On Saturday, October 29th, I emailed them to ask for a status update, to which they told me my items had just been "loaded" onto the truck the day prior and wouldn't be leaving Florida until Tuesday November 1st. Apparently after they pick up your items, they get loaded onto another truck with other peoples items so they can complete multiple trips at once. They ensured me I would receive my items that weekend.

They also said that my items were going to be delivered by Coach USA. When I contacted Coach USA, they let me know they don't even offer this service and that they are a shuttle bus service.

The weekend passes and t's now Monday, November 7th. It has been 15 days since my items were picked up. I have called their staff (Karen and Danielle) multiple times, and have yet to receive a call back. When I emailed Danielle, she gave me a vague automated answer saying "At this time the driver is still in route. As soon as he is 24-48 hours out they will call you." She had said this multiple times prior and I had already let her know I never received a call. I called the manager Sean to ask about this, and he was so rude and inconsiderate. He didn't even let me talk and rudely said "give me a few more hours to get back to you. you think you're mad? I'm even more mad than you".

At this point, I just want my items. I'm so sad that I had to spend my entire savings to hire this moving company and they don't even have the decency or professionalism to provide me with accurate updates.

UPDATE - Danielle has called me back and has continued to speak to me in a rude and disrespectful manner, as if I'm being an inconvenience for seeking clarity about where my items are. She has told me "I'm not allowed to tell you where the truck is" and threatened to hang up the phone with me. When I asked her "Wow this is the customer service I'm receiving?" She HUNG UP. I will update this if anything changes.

Move size: 1 Bedroom Home Service cost: $3968

Somehow (buying reviews?) this company has many 5-star reviews. DO NOT TRUST THEM!! Or the good reviews you read on so many moving websites. Seriously, how this company got so many websites to rank them highly is just beyond me. Here's my story:

I got quotes from four different companies. They were the only ones who didn't come out to do an actual inventory (red flag 1 - unfortunately, I knew none of these red flags at the time). They came in lowest, so I hired them. They asked me to send one of the inventories I'd gotten from one of the other movers, which I did, and they gave me an updated estimate (still lower than the others). I also asked, before I made a commitment, about time limits as I was willing to ship my items earlier to get them there in a reasonable amount of time. The saleswoman said that it would probably take 7-10 days (cross country) and that picking up early wasn't necessary. They take a 40% deposit at hire (red flag 2). I updated my inventory twice before move (as I was still getting rid of stuff during packing), and they gave me an updated estimate.

Come moving day, somebody other than IVL shows up (red flag 3) in a Budget truck (red flag 4). The guy looked at my apartment and said that, based on his "20 years of experience," I had 450 cubic feet, but he would do me a favor and only charge me for 431 cubic feet, which happened to be the footage on my first estimate. (Oh, red flag 5 - they go by cubic feet, not weight. The salespeople will try to upsell you on this, but you can't have them weigh afterwards to make sure that they're not overcharging you!) So the movers IVL hired didn't honor their binding estimate. This ended up costing me ~$400 more than their estimate. (I took pictures of the paperwork when the movers dropped my stuff off. They had my load at 300 cubic feet. This would have been a price difference of over $1000.)

I emailed IVL after arriving in my new location (6 days after pickup). I was told the following day that my stuff still hadn't left the warehouse and it could take them up to 21 business days (read: ~4 weeks to deliver). This is all in their paperwork, and if you call them out, they'll say, You had it in writing, but as my sister said, this is basically them saying, Don't trust a thing we tell you. (Seriously. Don't.) I continued following up with them, eventually asking them to call instead of email because I wanted to have an actual conversation. When she did call (3 days later), she was incredibly angry that I wanted to, you know, actually speak to the people to whom I'd given 90% of my belongings and a not insignificant amount of money. She then finally told me my stuff would be packed the following week (4 weeks after pickup and 3 weeks after my first available delivery date).

My stuff finally arrived over 2 weeks after it was originally shipped (6 weeks after it was picked up). They lost two of my chairs and my dining room table. Oh, and they're supposed to pay me for the late shipment. ($20 a day, and they reneged about what the first late day was. All of this was rather insulting.) My stuff was delivered 30 days ago and I still haven't gotten a check.

If you're still with me, maybe you have an idea of what waiting for your things will feel like if you go with IVL. Save yourself the hassle (and money when you have to replace your things and get upcharged) and go with a better company.

Move size: 1 Bedroom Home Service cost: $4400

IVL moved me through a sub-contracted company, Y and O Moving out of Florida. This company hired two convicts with long rap sheets to move us. While my wife was downstairs in our home two of the movers proceeded to rob us of thousands of dollars worth of valuables (that we had moved ourselves). The two individuals then proceeded to try and sell the items at a later date. This triggered arrest warrants through the local PD and both individuals were arrested. I have litigated both companies and both are claiming that it isn't their problem that they hired convicts who robbed us of items not even moved by them. I offer this as a warning to anyone considering these companies. They are negligent in their hiring practices and lack integrity to take responsibility when their negligence causes harm to their customer. They then refuse to compensate and drag out the legal process in hopes that they can avoid any culpability in the matter. Truly disgusting behavior.

Move size: 3 Bedroom Home Service cost: $8326

We moved our family in October 2022 from California to south Texas. IVL provided a “guaranteed quote” of about $15K to move our 4 bedroom home. Even though we reduced our inventory by one refrigerator after the quote, they increased the price on pickup day by nearly 50%! It was a holiday, so they forced us to go to a local store and purchase about a dozen money orders to make up the difference. Otherwise they would leave without picking up our goods in the home we had just sold. The driver told us that this underestimation is commonplace with their sales people!

When they delivered our shipment to or new Texas home, they added an additional $1800 on the day of delivery and made us get a cashiers check before they would unload. They then declined to do an inventory of delivered items and quickly left the area. We subsequently discovered they had failed to deliver several boxes including irreplaceable family photos.

They damaged multiple furniture items due to sloppy packing and handling. IVL Sales had confirmed before we decided to go with them that insurance coverage was 60 cents per pound multiplied times the total weight of our shipment to cover damage. That was a blatant misrepresentation even though we asked for clarification and confirmation of our understanding during the discussion. They then informed us that they would only pay 60 cents per pound of damaged items. The coverage is worthless. We also received a box that was clearly tagged for another shipment. They quickly whisked it away without any documentation or discussion. That is probably what happened to our missing boxes.

We selected them in part because the sales person represented that they could be flexible on our delivery date, but it would be timely based on our needs. That was certainly not the case. They were drifting toward missing the outer limit of their maximum delivery guarantee of no more than 20 business days beyond the request date, even though I told their sales person that I would go with another carrier if it took more than 10 days beyond our request date. We spent many hours on the phone with customer service and escalated to operations management attempting to get them to comply with their own delivery window. We believe they had simply forgotten us and would have been extremely delayed if we had not invested the 20-30 hours negotiating with them.

Although customer service reps were professional and cordial, management was abusive. They were likewise abusive when we filed these complaints to the Better Business Bureau. They ridiculed us and offered no compensation for all of these errors on their part.

We advise you take any other carrier over IVL. We have never experienced such poor and abusive customer service.

Move size: 4 Bedroom Home Service cost: $22000

International Van Lines is the worst company I have ever done business with in my entire life, to the point where their disastrous handling of my move was genuinely traumatic for me, and I haven’t been able to write this review until now, six months later. It’s still hard.

Short version: They lied about the timeline, refused to tell me when my stuff was arriving once they had our money, delivered it a month late, lost and destroyed a substantial amount of belongings, and then created an intentionally impossible to complete claims process so that we couldn’t even make a claim on the damage.

Long version: International Van Lines was hired to move my belongings from California to Massachusetts, with a delivery date of November 15th. We arranged to have the stuff picked up on October 30th, and the sales representative assured us that it rarely took more than a week to arrive.

The first sign of trouble was when the contracted movers showed up and had a bunch of terms that were not in the original moving contract with IVL, including that they weren’t liable for damage to various types of furniture; this despite the fact that the moving company is owned by IVL. We were forced to either accept the new terms or lose half of the substantial ($6000+) cost of the move.

Once they had the stuff, IVL suddenly changed their tune, refusing to confirm they would deliver on the 15th as agreed, and insisting that was an “estimate” and they had up to 30 days to deliver after that. The contract specified that they would “make every possible effort” to deliver on the 15th, but they did not even pretend to try. My stuff did not depart California until November 26th, 11 days after it was supposed to arrive; International Van Lines still refused to provide an estimate for delivery when the truck left. I had moved on the 14th and was forced to reside in an empty apartment for weeks, even as I started a new job. When I asked them what had happened, they said “Nothing has failed” and it was all going according to plan, in direct breach of the contract.

My stuff ultimately did not arrive until Friday, December 9th, and we were given only 48 hours notice (with the driver calling us from Virginia and asking where our stuff was going, apparently not even being told the delivery destination!) The stuff that arrived was a disaster; frames that they had specifically promised to wrap were unprotected and damaged, backs of shelving ripped, a handmade table with a shattered base and internal damage that ultimately cost $300 to fix (and would have been another $200+ for all the scratches), a broken TV stand, etc. The stickers they used to keep track of which boxes were which had fallen off, so they had no system to determine what actually arrived; multiple boxes were missing, and the items were never recovered.

The movers then damaged both the couch and the bedframe assembling them, and did not inform me; I would only discover later when the bed started collapsing with me in it, and I found twisted metal because they hadn’t bothered to install any of the support screws and struts. Meanwhile, the futon was not only misassembled such that it was unusable as a futon, but they stripped the bolts; we can’t fix it, and we’ll have to destroy it in order to get it out of the apartment.

Finally, they outsourced the claims process to a company that built an intentionally impossible process: websites that only showed one part of the process at a time, and wouldn’t save your work, requiring hours and hours of form-filling and forcing you to restart, combined with asking increasingly absurd questions (like the purchase date for every item); the alternate was mailing in a package, which other reviews all attested they would pretend to not receive so they wouldn’t have to pay out a claim. We were not able to make any claims on the damaged and missing items, despite me spending a good 6 hours on the claims process before realizing it was futile.

I have never felt so victimized. I deeply regret doing business with International Van Lines, and to this day - six months later - am finding new damage and missing items from the move.

Move size: 1 Bedroom Home Service cost: $6139