BAY AREA TO BROOKLYN

Derek Submitted this review about Ship a Car Direct
Review made Live: 7/10/2012 11:33:00 AM
First experience shipping a car - did research online and thought I'd roll the dice with Safe-Direct after reading their reviews and viewing their videos. They seemed different from other brokers and all in all I had a pleasant experience with them. Chris was great at explaining the process and responsive in returning my calls (even checked his email and responded to questions on a holiday).

I was shipping my moms 1996 Volvo from CA to NY, and she had limited windows of availability. I got a little worried when the car wasn't assigned 4 days before the pickup date and started questioning my choice and the fee they quoted. I voiced my concerns to Chris and he assured me the offer wasn't a 'low-ball' amount and he was confident (based on recent moves at a comparable rate) it would get assigned. A day later the car was assigned to MVG and I felt a lot better. Communication (primarily language barrier) with the driver was challenging at times, as I needed to relay a more convenient pickup location, but in the end, the driver, Val, was courteous and responsive to my texts (he was patient and even waited for an hour for my mom to arrive at the pickup location, as the car had starting issues). Car arrived 7 days later in NY, and he even drove it to my apartment which was an awesome surprise - I thought I'd be picking it up a some random shopping mall. I did a thorough inspection and didn't see any new scratches or dents on the car, nor anything wrong with the windows.

I would definitely use Safe-Direct again and would be happy with MVG as the car carrier. The only gripe or nit about the broker was that some customer service functions were 'over-managed' as I received automated emails about my move that were very generic and obviously generated by their email system. Sometimes the emails were incorrect and the system pumped out an email despite recent changes I made with the broker (i.e., I pushed back the pickup date 2 weeks but the system said, 'you have an upcoming move this week'). Again, this was more annoying than anything but didn't sour my overall experience with Safe-Direct.