Delta Moving Systems

STRONGLY RECOMMEND NOT USING DELTA MOVING SERVICES! Things started out well with DMS moving from the Houston, TX area to the Pittsburgh, PA area. A number of guys showed up for wrapping, packing, and loading. We felt good about our choice! At the Pittsburgh end, however, only two guys for A LOT of furniture and boxes. The one Delta employee (at about 9:30am) said more guys were on the way. Two local guys appeared at around 2pm and clearly were not moving professionals. They were dismissed shortly thereafter. One may have put the hit on the front post on the porch and damaged it severly. We rented this home, so that repair has to be made! Talked with Ray who set-up this move and we sent photos (below) of the damage. A week, or so goes by and no call...no email...no text. I finally reached Ray on the phone over a week ago and he said he had read our two emails and saw the damage. "Let me check with the insurance company, review the quote you received, and I'll get back to you within 48 hours." THAT WAS MORE THAN A WEEK AGO. I've made numerous calls since, but Ray is never available. Their website talks about how secure you can feel knowing that they are fully insured, but it appears to me that I'm out $1,195!! There are crooks in every business, I suppose, and it appears that I found another. UPDATE: 10/05/2022 - Ray began texting (not calling) my wife. He read the review above (although he told me that he couldn't care less about what was on the Internet about DMS) and was upset. My wife asked "why." Is everthing not truthful? So much for insurance for moving companies and those movers that tout it on their website. We are definitely out $1,195! That takes the total cost of the move to more than $15K!! Maybe Ray will move forward with insurance reimbursement and I'll remove this review?

A low-ball estimate was provided ($11, 900). When I questioned the significant difference between the DMS (Delta Moving Systems) quote and the other 4 estimates I got, I was assured by them that the others were overinflated because they use CF not just weight. I sent a very detailed inventory list to each company that I requested a quote from, accompanied by a video of every item in every room of the house and backyard, along with still pictures of heavier items to be sure that an accurate quote was provided by each. (No in-person estimates were done with any of the 5 movers due to Covid concerns.) They adjusted their quote upward to $13,700 because I pushed for accuracy, insisting that I wasn’t looking for the lowest bid, I wanted the most accurate (this can be verified with the recordings). In actuality, all the other quotes were all within the ballpark of each other and they turned out to be the more accurate quotes. Not so with Delta Moving Systems. Final cost for the move was $21,211.00 – NEARLY DOUBLE THE ORIGINAL DMS QUOTE. When the 1st team arrived at 9:00am on 11/30/20, the foreman, Luis, did a walkthrough of the house with me and viewed everything including closets. Not a word was said that they suspected I had more goods than originally estimated. At 2:30am in the morning, 17 and ½ hours later, they presented me with a surprise bill– a revised estimate saying I now would owe $17,720!!! When I questioned it, they said I had considerably more items than on the original inventory list and pointed to ‘lots of additional boxes’. They also said they used 45 more china boxes and 45 more wardrobe boxes (exact same number for each) and they had to charge me $3200 more for packing materials. So, IT WAS AT 2:30AM THAT WE FIRST SAW THE ‘Bill of Lading’ and the ‘Order For Service’ which says it is to be signed BEFORE services begin but, of course, we couldn’t do that because it wasn’t presented to us until then! In that section it also mentions information and a booklet we were to receive, WHICH WE DIDN’T, but my husband was being told, sign here, sign here, sign here with a stack of papers...and exhausted he did so without reading all the fine print at 2:30am. I had no way to verify that what they were saying was true at 2:30am and was forced to write a check for $10,576 on the spot. They said if I didn’t take their word for it and accept the proposed flat fee charge of $17,720. they would go to the weigh station and I would be charged based on that and it would be more. We were concerned about the fact that the crew had driven from Houston at 4:00am, arrived at our home at 9:00am, started packing and continued to do so until the following morning at 2:30am, only taking a break when we fed them lunch and dinner and then started the 4+ hour drive back to Houston at 2:30am, meaning THEY WERE WORKING MORE THAN 24 HOURS STRAIGHT WITHOUT SLEEP. When I questioned the foreman, Luis, about his safety and the safety of our goods, he said, “Don’t worry. I’m used to this.” I felt very badly for their men because they were hard workers, a couple of them from Cuba and a couple from Mexico, that we fed well and tipped well. I don’t know what the labor laws are for this industry but I find it hard to believe that anyone is allowed to work that long without sleep, given the safety risks. btw...the reason the 1st crew worked so long was because the 2nd truck and crew which I was told would show up at 3:00pm, didn’t arrive until 7:00pm that night – and that was a Ryder rental truck not a Delta Moving Systems truck. I also was told at 2:30am that they weren’t able to get everything on the 2 trucks (they got 95% of our household goods on them) and a 3rd truck would have to come get the remaining items. It took 2 days to get them to pick up the last of the items and they showed up in an unmarked truck, not DMS nor a rental. When Camille, the dispatch manager, called to arrange for delivery I expressed my unhappiness with everything that had happened thus far and she in essence said it was my own fault for not having an in-person estimate done. I pointed out that everyone else gave what turned out to be an accurate estimate with the same data they had and she still argued that I had no one but myself to blame. She then told us that the trucks would leave Houston on Friday, 12/4 at 6:00am and would be in New Concord, KY between 2:00-4:00pm that afternoon (~750 miles away). When my husband told her that it was physically impossible to do so, she argued with him. He pointed out that it was a 10+ hour trip from Rowlett, TX when traveling by car at 75 mph and that a truck traveling 4 hours further (which is how far Houston is from our TX home) it couldn’t possibly make it in 8-10 hours. So, she regrouped and said, “Okay, the truck will get there at 8:00-9:00pm then and will start unloading.” My husband objected and said, “You’re not going to put us through what you did on Monday and work all through the night unloading after your men have been on the road for that long. They need to stay in a hotel overnight so they are fresh and ready otherwise we’re going to have broken goods when they unload.” Camille refused saying they weren’t going to pay the cost of a hotel for the men. At that point, I remembered what I had been told by one of the movers and said, “Camille, isn’t it a DOT law that the drivers can’t drive more than 11 hours straight or more than 500 miles at one time? They can’t possibly get here Friday night and start unloading, now can they?” There was dead silence at that point. Then she put us on hold and came back a couple minutes later and said, “My boss approved the overnight stay. They will be there Saturday morning.” I told Tracy the 2nd in command at DMS about this conversation and asked her how their dispatch manager could not have known the laws about this? She said Camille was new in the role and hadn’t learned everything yet. It’s concerning that important things like these travel laws aren’t known by the person scheduling the dispatches. We raised the question of verifying the weight of our goods and were told by DMS that we could meet the drivers at a weigh station and they would weigh them in front of us – BUT WE HAD TO BE THE ONES TO FIND A WEIGH STATION TO MAKE THAT HAPPEN, NOT THEM! We attempted to do so and located one in Fulton, KY – about an hour and 1/2 from our home – but then found out that it was closed. We finally gave up trying to find one because it was going to further delay the delivery of our household goods. Regarding the 500+ items on the inventory list that Luis said explained why they were charging us thousands of dollars more than the original quote, I found even before the trucks arrived that inventory numbers had been attached to everything that was the size of a breadbox or bigger. We had set aside quite a number of items in a room, with signs attached ‘Do Not Pack’ taped to them because we were moving them ourselves. I discovered when we were unloading them from our cars that they each had inventory numbers on them. I sent photos to DMS to show them that they had even counted as inventory items things they didn’t even move! Then when the movers arrived I had several people in addition to myself there to check off the items when they came off the truck. I was determined to figure out where/what all these extra ‘items’ were. What we quickly discovered was that Luis had used the same numbers over again on the inventory sheets when they got to 300. So, we had two #1s, two #2s, all the way to two #200+. And the stickers were all the same color yellow, so we couldn’t tell what was from the first set of 200+ and what was from the second set of 200. And they didn’t identify the master inventory number on any of the sheets, so we couldn’t track using that. To add insult to injury, the labeling of the items often didn’t match either entry on the inventory list. (e.g. Item on the inventory list indicated a gas tank when it actually was a box with kitchen ware) I brought this to David’s attention (foreman on the delivery side) and he said Luis was tired and wasn’t thinking clearly about using different colors and when things got hurried wrong items were listed. Luis has been doing this for 15+ years so I find it hard to believe he didn’t think to use different colored stickers when he started numbering from #1 again. We finally gave up trying to reconcile the inventory because short of tearing boxes open to see what was in there, we couldn’t determine what it really was. The moving men were getting frustrated because it was taking so long and we were getting nowhere. Additionally, we discovered that not only were there inventory numbers on everything from an 8x11 Christmas box, to a file folder box, the boxes were then put in a larger wardrobe box and those boxes then had multiple inventory numbers on that larger box – often 4 or 5. (We took pictures.) So, that is how they created this huge list of items to say we had more than we had realized. When I pointed all of this out to DMS, along with the photos, they said it didn’t matter in the long run because we were being charged by weight. I reminded them that this was the rationale that Luis had used to justify the surprise increased cost by several thousand dollars at 2:30am, not weight. I asked two of the moving men if the trucks were weighed with the packing material on or with them off the truck. One told me that they removed them first; the other told me that they kept them on the truck. Of course, I have no way to verify what was done. Then the 3rd truck was scheduled for delivery a week after the first two trucks because it had just a part of the truck used and they needed to wait until they had other’s home goods that could be added to fill the truck. At that time, we were informed that it was going to cost yet an additional $3,491.05! When I asked why we were offered a flat-rate of $17,720 at 2:30am and now they wanted thousands more, that they weren’t going to honor that offer, I was told it was because we had asked for it to be weighed and that original offer was now off the table. That is how we ended up paying $21,211. – in cash – for our total move. They then had the audacity to say that they had given us a generous $550 manager’s discount which is what brought the original quote down to $11,700. And they had refunded $78 because they hadn’t told us that they charge 3% if you use a credit card, which we did for the deposit. And, for all the pain they put us through the owner decided it was worth knocking $250 off the total which would have been $21,461. How generous is that?!? The good news is that we have a small number of broken items. The bad news is that it is largely in part because they wrapped virtually everything in a moving blanket, sometimes two of them, and then frequently wrapped those items in boxes that were already wrapped in blankets. Some items, such as a 30”x30” canvas picture, had four 40”x60” boxes used to pack it. All of that extra bulk contributed to them not being able to fit everything on the two trucks as planned. They did lose boxes that contained a number of pricey items from the 3rd truck because it also contained goods from two other households. We have no idea who ended up with them and at the end of the day it is cheaper for the moving company to pay .60 per pound for the loss than see that the items are returned. I still need to file claims for those which amounts to ~$1,500. I raised each of the above concerns to their customer support person, Tammy, the daughter of the owner and Tracy, who is the 2nd in command. I was told there was no grounds for any of the complaints – not the bait and switch with the low bid; not springing several thousands more in charges on us at 2:30am without any warning; not the safety concerns with the men working 24+ hours straight; not the way they did the inventory list which couldn’t be checked; not being able to validate the weight; not honoring the $17,720 offer the next day. When I threatened to file a formal complaint with FMCSA, and any other agency that might have jurisdiction, and post negative reviews about my experience, they offered me a $1,000 to come to a compromise. They then asked me for all the other quotes I had gotten so that they could evaluate where the deviation came into play. I sent them the spreadsheet with a complete breakout of the quote data I had for all 5 bids. They then said that wasn’t sufficient, they wanted all of the official files from each of the other movers. At that point, I stopped trying to come to a resolution because we were about 10 emails into it over a period of several weeks and I knew I was coming up to the 60-day deadline to file a complaint. Their goal wasn’t to honor their flat rate bid of $17,720, it was to keep the extra several thousand dollars they charged and find a way to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the protocol violations. PS – When I did a search for the company based on the DOT#2277051 it came up as ‘Best Moving and Storage Inc.’ not Delta Moving Systems as their documents and website show. PSS - Darrin B., the sales person, who did the quote told me that the had been rated #1 by Angie’s List for 2019. I could find nothing that showed that was true.

They were unprofessional, uncommunicative, and not responsible. I would never recommend them to anybody. Furnishings came in damaged and were dragged out the truck.

Awful, bait in switch, gave them an inventory list quote was 2800 when they got to my apartment it was 8000 and I didn't have a choice but to pay, when they got to Houston I had to run to get a US Postal money order when took and 1.5 hours so when I got back they said I'd used up my two hours and would only load my stuff in the driveway!!! PLEASE DO NOT USE THIS COMPANY! BAIT AND SWITCH, awful drivers, stuff all dinged up and missing legs to furniture

The price was good not great. The crew that picked our stuff up in California was very good. That's the best I can say. Everything else was terrible. We picked them because they are Texas based and the estimator said they have 3-4 trucks a week going to Texas. NOT TRUE. They only go 3-4 times if they have that many moves scheduled. If they don't, you sit and sit and sit.... Our stuff was picked up in California on June 27th and as of July 8th it is still sitting in storage in California. Any money we saved using them has been lost (and then some) in hotel/food costs as we sit in Fort Worth waiting for delivery. The coordinator keeps saying the same thing, "Your 1st available delivery date was July 5th". We picked that date based on what the estimator told us. We could have been there by July 1st (not that it would have made a difference). We are still waiting for our things. We would not recommend them and will definitely not use them next year for our next move.