Headaches Along way

J. Silva Submitted this review about Magic Carpet Auto Transport
Review made Live: 7/22/2010 3:22:00 PM
So here is my story, and before I begin let me say I know that it must be tough coordinating shipments but I could not believe the difficulty I endured. I booked my shipment from north of Boston to Santa Rosa California about 4-5 weeks in advance. Everything seemed fine until I had not heard about the ship date close to the estimated time. I called and was told that it was extremely difficult to get a car shipped up to Santa Rosa and they were unsure when a truck would be available. Well that wasn’t going to work so we settled on shipping it to San Francisco where we were moving. Ok that is fine, well the car is getting picked up on Monday and my mother took the day off of work because we were not sure what time the truck was coming to pick up the car. Around noon eastern we heard from a driver that he was not able to get to the city where the car was parked and we would need to drive it 15 miles to a mall parking lot. Ok that would have been nice to know a little bit ahead of time. This means my mother has to find within an hour another person to pick her up from the mall. That person being my father who now has to leave work. The truck gets there and the car settles in for its nice drive to San Francisco. The car gets there quick, now usually that would be a good thing, but it arrived 3 days before its estimated arrival. Now I know the definition of the word estimate but this left us in a bind. We were currently sitting in Utah driving our belongings across the country and would not be arriving in San Francisco until Monday. The trucking company was pretty good to deal with, although I do not understand how Sunday is a delivery day and the car couldn’t be picked up on Monday. I understand scheduling but a Sunday delivery day seemed strange. So after working with the trucking company we agree to meet on Monday in Los Angeles. No problem we just changed our route a little bit. Monday comes and around noon pacific we reach the driver who gives us an address outside of Compton and tells him to meet him in 90 minutes. Fair enough we go to the address and wait two hours, with no word from the driver. After getting in contact with dispatch, we find out the truck has a flat and is still in the bay area outside of San Jose. Well even without getting the flat, there is no way he would have been outside of LA in 90 minutes. Dispatch is great and tells us he apologizes and to drive on Route 5 and we will meet the driver along the route. Well we get 2 hours outside of San Francisco and we can finally meet the driver. That goes smoothly but what a pain in the rear. On top of this, we had already planned on providing a money order in Santa Rosa that we had mailed to our Aunt who was going to pay for the car. With that money in Santa Rosa we need to transfer funds to come up with the cash to provide to the driver now. And oh yah I forgot that we were originally quoted a deposit of 270 and then they only took 200 from our credit card? Weird? It ended up being the same price but that struck me as strange. I had minimal contact with Magic, and have not heard anything about my $50 rebate which after this experience I would be very happy to get. All in all, a series of headaches and confusion. I would have liked more contact and earlier that it was going to be difficult to get the car to Santa Rosa, and I would have assumed that they would have known ahead of time that our pick up location would not work for some reason. I will be trying another carrier in the future if I am in need of shipment.