When I agreed to hire Tippet Richardson it was on the explicit condition that as part of the transportation process, they store my belongings in a heated secure warehouse. T.R. also promised to provide me with a weekend delivery which they also failed to honor. As a result of this I had to scramble to make new arrangements for when I could get into my new place.
On the day the movers showed up at my new place & began unloading the van I noticed all my belongings were covered in a layer of condensation. I asked (repeatedly) how this was possible seeing as everything was supposed to have been stored in a heated/secure warehouse & (eventually) the truth came out about how the van had sat overnight outside in a hotel parking lot (definitely not heated given the time of year & I question how secure this was). The excuse they gave? They said they were unable to secure a reservation for the ferry ride to the island – this from a company that has been in the moving business in British Columbia since 1987. Surely after 23 years they would be familiar with BC Ferries scheduling for commercial trucks. I find it reprehensible & totally lacking in integrity that T.R. did not contact me to let me know they were unable to secure a ferry reservation & then ask me what I would like to do. At the very least, upon arriving at my new home on the move-in day, the first thing they should have informed me of was that they had not stored my belongings as they had promised (& charged me for). They should have also produced a refund cheque for this amount right then & there. This they did not do either & instead it was left up to me to discover what had actually gone on – i.e. condensation all over my belongings.
In all; when you add up the failure to meet the aforementioned condition of contract, the failure of their crew to honour the weekend delivery along with 1 crew-member’s failure to remove his dirty work boots when tramping across new carpet (whom I asked no less than 3 times), minor damage to a number of my possessions (in my opinion due to inadequate packing material - they also showed up with too few poly bed-bags & packed 1 bed with no covering) I would rate their service an F-. CONSUMER BEWARE.
Ironically Tippet Richardson currently hold an A+ rating on the Better Business Bureau Mainland Vancouver Website. In my opinion, this is a joke, they have had 5 complaints filed against them in the last 12 months & in my case even though it shows they made a ‘good faith effort’ (hardly, in the end they simply refused mediation by a 3rd party) to resolve the complaint, Cameron McCue, from the BBB Dispute Department - said during a phone conversation in response to the complaint I filed & Tippet Richardson’s response (& I quote): “if I was to put myself in your shoes I probably wouldn’t be satisfied” Cameron went on to agree that it was not right for Tippet Richardson to have charged me a storage fee for a heated secure warehouse & then leave my belongings in an unsecure hotel parking lot overnight. And when I asked Cameron whether or not T.R. had been honest about what they had done his response was: “it doesn’t sound like it, does it.” Sadly it appears the Better Business Bureau is a toothless tiger, they take money from their members (at some point affording them an A+ rating) & it appears (to me) they enforce no standard. In fact Cameron said they are not in the enforcement business & he went on to say: “if I could personally address the issue it would be a completely different story.”
