Complaint Review: International Van Lines

My wife and I were planning a cross country move from Virginia to California. Unfortunately for us, we chose International Van Lines (IVL) International Van Lines (IVL) now called Madison Van Lines to move us across country.

They are liars when they say that they use their own moving trucks to move you. They don't. Here is a quote from Ryan, our relocation “expert” from IVL in an email “This move will be handled by OUR MOVERS, OUR TRUCKS, IVL the whole way through”. When they finally showed up at our apartment, they came in a U-Haul already half full with someone else’s stuff.

They showed up late. We had our move scheduled for a Wednesday at 1:00pm. They showed up at 10:00pm. At 1:00am, they finally finished loading the U-Haul. They had to call in another non-IVL truck to move the rest of our stuff the next morning. After they loaded our stuff, they told me I needed to pay extra because my apartment was more than 75ft from the U-Haul which was not part of our binding contract.

After finding a place to live in California, I had difficulty in trying to get a hold of IVL as I was trying to find out exactly where our stuff was at the time. My wife and I were wandering if our stuff had been stolen. I was finally told our stuff was on its way, however this turned out to be another lie as I found out later our stuff hadn’t even made it on the truck as it was still in storage in Maryland. Their excuse was the company they used to move our stuff forgot to pick it up in Maryland. Now we were forced to stay in a hotel an additional week.

I movers called as they were getting closer to California. They told me I had to pay them in cash or they would not be able to deliver our stuff. I was under the impression from IVL when I paid for the first half of the move WITH a credit card that I could use a credit card again as I do not have that kind of money on hand in my bank. I complained to IVL and the so-called manager told me I could pay them with a credit card and they would pay the company. He said I needed to sign a credit card authorization slip and he would email it to me. He never did email the authorization to me - another lie among many. I ended up taking a credit card cash advance to pay for this.

Our stuff finally arrived at our new rental house. They came in a big huge white moving truck and they made quite a scene as they blocked people from being able to pull their cars in and out of their own driveways. I spoke to the movers and they are actually from a company in Hoboken, New Jersey. Our property was combined with other people’s stuff, so the movers had a difficult time locating our stuff in the truck. They finally moved our stuff into our new home. We checked the inventory and found that we were missing two chairs and found damage to a picture frame, two floor fans, and our $3000.00 incline trainer.

They do have a lot of positive reviews but they just got busted by Yelp for paying people to write reviews and now they have changed their business name to Madison Van lines. The positive reviews were one of the major influences in making my decision.