My experience with Red Carpet was inconsistent. Certainly Denise Flores was friendly and generally very accessible. However, I had a lot of frustrations with Red Carpet's lack of control over the truck's pick-up timing...and for that matter, whether or not a truck would even choose to pick up our car. I put in the order for pickup just over a month out from the first day of my pickup window. My initial agreed price was $995 for cross-country shipment from LA to upstate New York...a very reasonable/good price. As days and then several weeks went by without getting a message that a truck had agreed to pick up my car for transport, I became worried about ensuring that there would be an agreed pickup, and on what date that pickup would happen.
Admittedly, my timing was not the best, as I wanted some certainty around a pickup date of Dec 20-22, shortly prior to Xmas and also a smaller window than the week Red Carpet would like to give.
I emailed and called Denise several times about the situation...she was always friendly and responsive, but little to no progress was made until I agreed to up my bid price to $1,150. That same day, I received a message that a pickup had been arranged...for Dec 17, which was not a convenient day for me.
Since I was out of the country, my wife became involved in the discussions with Denise, and then also with her boss. We canceled the scheduled Dec 17 pickup, and said that since we had paid more $$, we expected to be able to get a pickup on or very close to the Dec 22 pickup date we preferred. We were told that it was really hard to guarantee a specific date, but a higher bid would help us to guarantee. So, we raised our bid price again, this time to $1,350. We then were finally able to confirm a pickup date of Dec 22.
The truck driver arrived for pickup as scheduled on Dec 22. The initial schedule delivery date to upstate NY was Jan 1...again, a pretty inconvenient date for a vendor to meet, so I expected that the delivery would probably be late due to the holidays. The truck driver ended up delivering to upstate NY on Jan 5, which was four days late. It was not a problem for the receiving party (my father), however, it might of been a cause of more angst if the receiving party had been an independent buyer of the car and not my relative.
All in all, we had a mixed and inconsistent experience with Red Carpet. Again, Denise was friendly and responsive. But we ended up paying $350 more than originally agreed, and they really have little to no control over what the trucks decide to do, and so there is limited ability to guarantee pickup and delivery plans and to ensure that the experience is seamless and without anxiety or concern for the customer. Having said all that, I have a feeling that this type of thing is par for the course with these long distance car transport companies, so I would probably use this company again...but with the experience of several lessons learned.
