© All Rights Reserved
Compare MoveAmerica to Van Lines and Moving Companies
MoveAmerica provides a less inexpensive, service superior move
MoveAmerica ALWAYS provides equipment on the day requested. A van line can't, and doesn't begin to do this unless you have a very large shipment (10,000 pounds or more), and will typically offer you a "spread" of days during which they hope to provide you with a trailer. Typically a van line will bring you a trailer on one of three to five days. They don't know, and thus cannot tell you, which one of the days your trailer will arrive. So you have to sit there with your house packed up, waiting for the driver to show up. Often (about 15%) of the time, they experience a "service failure" and can't provide you the equipment even during the spread of days. At this point they will try to provide "emergency service", and pickup your shipment on their local equipment and transfer it to their warehouse.
Unfortunately, by the time their operations people realize they cannot conjure up the line haul equipment it is late in the day. So what happens. If you are "lucky", at that point, a local crew which has already worked hard all day doing someone else's move will come out and load your shipment into a local truck for transport back to the company warehouse. There it is unloaded and placed on the warehouse floor by some very very tired workers. It is during this process that much damage occurs, and you don't want it to happen to you. Here your shipment sits, waiting for a truck to arrive to re-load your shipment and continue your move. They transfer it yet again to the new truck (transfer number three!). MoveAmerica will never do this to you.
Suppose you are not "lucky", and the local van line's agent can't scratch together a crew for you. Basically, you are out of luck and have to find another mover. There you sit, left high and dry. If it is the busy moving season, you may be completely out of options.
Even if you are fortunate enough to have your shipment loaded during the spread of days requested, your shipment may be "set off" at an intermediate warehouse, or transferred from one van to another (known in the industry as van-to-vanning, to increase the moving companys operational efficiences or respond to some operational necessity. MoveAmerica, once again, does not do this. Ever.
When a van line's driver comes to load your shipment, he does not have professional loaders accompanying him or her. What happens is, rather than hire expensive moving company labor, he goes to the nearest itinerant lot and picks up lot help, or "lumpers", on a daily cash rate to go into your house and move your furniture from the house into the truck. There, under the driver's supervision, they load the truck. Obviously, in case of loss or theft, you will NEVER be able to find any of these people again. Even the driver is not an employee of the van line in most cases, but usually is an independant contractor who is free to accept and refuse loads at will.
With MoveAmerica, you are the only household goods shipment on the trailer. With a van line, you may be one of as many as 10 shipments.
MoveAmerica has NEVER lost a single item to theft. No van line can make that claim.
MoveAmerica does not allow itinerant labor, other movers, or other customers on and off your trailer. Van lines do this as a matter of routine when they stop to load and unload other customers. And, drivers normally hire "lot help", or "casual labor" rather than moving professionals to help them load and unload. This is normal practice in the van line industry. With MoveAmerica, your shipment is locked behind a Security Divider, and your trailer is locked and sealed once your shipment is inside. All MoveAmerica trailers stay in a locked, gated, and patrolled facility each evening when not being driver where access is severely restricted.
MoveAmerica arrives much faster than a van line. Coast to coast with MoveAmerica is about 4 or 5 business, where a van line usually takes 14-21 days while you wait for your furniture.
If you not reacheable within a very short period of time upon the arrival of your shipment at your destination city, the van line will place your shipment into "SIT", or storage in transit. This is extremely expensive, and you will pay for Warehouse Handling from the line haul trailer into the local agent's storage facility, storage charged by the day at a very high rate, and a Delivery Out charge. This can add hundreds and thousands of dollars to your move.
There is significantly less damage with a MoveAmerica move than a van line move, since theft of your items is virtually impossible, your shipment is never moved from one trailer to another or from trailer to warehouse, and the total mileage your shipment moves is far less than it moves in a van line trailer.
Last but certainly not least, the cost of a MoveAmerica move is FAR less than a van line move, usually one half to as little as one third the cost.
One final thought. All of the above is what CAN happen with an honest van line with honest drivers, which represent the vast majority of van line agents, drivers, and loaders. Consider what can happen if you are unfortunate enough to run into a dishonest company or driver. First, since your shipment is based on weight, a dishonest driver can easily increase (or bump) the weight through many methods. One favorite is to get an empty weight with the fuel tanks empty, load your shipment, fill the tanks, and get a heavy weight. With twin 200 gallon tanks, this can add as much as 2400 pounds to your weight. Unless the weighmaster is extremely concientious, this practice will never be noticed. One favorite among dishonest movers is to arrive at destination and demand thousands of dollars more before unloading. While this practice is completely illegal, most people faced with the prospect of their entire shipment disappearing off to a locked warehouse somewhere, and faced with heavy storage charges and penalties, will fork over the money demanded. Again, this represents practices of a tiny fraction of the thousands of legitimate moving companies, but non-the-less does occur. However, it NEVER occurs with MoveAmerica. We only charge by the space you use in the trailer, which you can easily see and measure.