Very careless company -- my possessions badly damaged in storage and/or transit.
Friendly staff, but understaffed - and packing is done cheaply and inadequately, with brown paper and very cheap thin packing boxes (they break, everything falls out), furniture is not packed and protected at all, pictures, books, china &c all inadequately packed and protected. In my case this resulted in much expensive damage, including to unique and expensive artworks and family heirloom furniture.
I arranged and paid for Cranbury's to move the contents of a large house in Southampton and a flat in London to Amsterdam in July 2019. Many of my things arrived in Amsterdam seriously damaged from their time with Cranbury’s. Antique and other furniture had not been wrapped or protected (so chips and scraping, whole pieces of veneer broken off), while original oil paintings (dating from the early C18th to the present -- canvasses stretched, some scratches to oil pain, with some flakes of oil paint missing) were left unprotected, wrapped in brown paper or put in boxes with other items. Cranbury’s did not use bubble-wrap, or two-ply cardboard boxes. My professional library (I am a professor at the University of Southampton) was badly packed in cheap flimsy card-board boxes, with a number of valuable first-editions and rare books being effectively destroyed, and most others damaged by degrees through bad packing and boxes that fell apart in transit. I paid for insurance, but to put in an application for it, I have had to arrange for quotations for the work, each of which costs money -- the cheapest 120 Euros, the most expensive so far 160 Euros. The claim I put in took years to be processed, as I had to re-send it several times as Cranbury’s lost it several times, or forgot to forward it to the company. In the event I received a derisory sum of a couple of thousand pounds from the insurance company, and nothing from Cranbury’s. I paid a huge amount to Cranberry's for this move, much more than earlier moves, from Australia to the UK, and Hungary to the UK, and proportionately much more than Australian to the US and back -- all of these moves were professional, with proper packing and adequate numbers of people shifting and wrapping. Cranberry's sent two men to unpack -- if I had not hired an additional local mover and his escalator machine (at the cost of 635 Euros) to move the boxes from the ground to all the floors, there would have been a great deal more damage from boxes falling apart -- as it was, many were broken on arrival, or broke when lifted, too flimsy to hold their contents. The move to Amsterdam was necessary as my partner was being treated there for a terminal illness, and over the past eighteen months on top of my grieving I have had to deal with the callousness and carelessness of Cranbury’s as I endeavoured to pursue my claim against them.
May 28, 2021
Unprompted review