We had a miserable experience with Berman. We feel they lead us astray, repeatedly, hid behind the contract and made no effort to work to solve a problem.
We hired them to move my elderly mother from her home of decades to our city in a different state. Getting her settled in her new apartment quickly and easily was our priority.
First, I raised a concern about the contract providing a 2 week window for delivery. We needed a quicker process. The agent said, "Your driver will be loading your shipment direct so it is very unlikely we will even be to in the second half of that window." Based on this representation, we signed the contract. A week after taking her stuff, after daily conversations where they said different things, it still sat in Berman's warehouse.
Second, Berman knew on the day they packed that what their agent had said was no longer valid. The day they came to pack and load, they showed up 3 hours late. They insisting all that day they didn't know where their intended driver was. It was not until a week later they admitted that there had not been space on that truck for our load. And, they never said that day they were packing, or for many days following that, as a result of not having that driver, there would be a protracted delivery delay. If we had known then, we could have made other arrangements then.
Finally, rather than work with us to come up with a plan B, they did nothing as we continually reached out to them to try and get our load on the road. Ultimately, we hired a smaller, more nimble local moving company (A to Z - hooray!) to take the load from Berman and deliver it to us direct. This ended up costing us more than half of the total cost of the initial contract. Not only did we pay for the packing service Berman did perform, but also for a hefty insurance fee they said initially they would waive (since they weren't going to transport our goods), but the next day, after we arranged an alternative, demanded we pay (or take the goods without inspecting them but absolving Berman of responsibility were there any damage). read more