Internic Moving Services / Euro Transport review: Scam 17

”Commitment, honesty, caring, trust, integrity and accountability; these are just some of our core values.”
Looking for facts, and backtracking the details of our log with Internic Moving Services, I just found this sentence as their introduction motto for our first contact.
Knowing how deceitful and careless this company was for us,
knowing in how much trouble and distress they put us into, I could not help to laugh at the irony, as for us the full sentence should have been:
“these are just some of the core values the we are stomping on a daily basis.”

We had the misfortune to select Internic Moving Services a.k.a. Euro transport to move back from Canada to France.
I need to stress this is not our first international move.
Although our previous experiences went as smoothly as possible, we do understand that such sort of business has its own finance, schedule and logistic issues that mere mortals like ourselves are not meant to understand.
But in those very departments, Jack Monier and his company have pushed such unpredictability to a new state of art.

Beginning of April, we had to fall back to France rather quickly.
Money was (and still is, thanks to Internic) scarce for us, so we asked several companies for estimations. We were relying on our previous international move to assess the volume of the goods we had to ship.

We knew we were necessarily moving less than what we brought:
building on our past experience we knew that for a great deal of our furniture, it is cheaper to buy after our settlement rather than bringing all our stuff with us.

From the 6 companies answering our audit, Internic Moving Services a.k.a. Euro transport came up with the best price and service from their estimation. They were proposing to move our furniture’s that we estimated to be 6, 5 CBM for around 3000USD.
The price we could afford, given the service that was proposed:
Packing and door to door delivery.
We signed ( NOOOO ! ) and a celestial ### storm dashed and hits us hard.

It is interesting to know that IF you pack your goods by yourself, insurance companies are not bound to refund you in case anything happened during transportation. Our goods were definitely worth insuring so the company has to deal with the packing.
That was the theory…now comes the real thing.

First it becomes stressful.

Although we insisted many time on the phone; no companies, neither a representative from Internic or its contractors ever came to check for the goods to be wrapped and packed.
The moving date was fixed 3 weeks in advance, local contractors were located less than 5km away from our place, yet, nobody ever came to double-check for the volume, or the amount of boxes to be provided. We were just told not to worry as everything was going to be taken care of...

Yes!
everything was taken care of …by ourselves 24H before the truck arrived because there was some sort of “miscommunication” between Internic and its contractor.
In the end the contractor brought some boxes 18H before the loading because we begged them to, and we had to “deal with it by ourselves”. The “fragile” stuff was wrapped at the last minute.

This is messy but not enough, so they also omitted to bring a crate we specifically asked and paid for our TV equipment.
We were said “they were going to build a crate once the goods arrived in their hangar”…Somehow on the other side of the Atlantic ocean, 4 months later, we received our TV set, just wrapped in a blanket with plastics. Its stand is damaged and bend dangerously now: packed as it was, and stored under way too many boxes during transportation.

So far we managed to pay 400 USD for a packing service we happened to handle almost entirely by ourselves…and the few things left to do by the moving company damaged our goods. How good is that? Well that’s just an appetizer.

Yet the guys from the contracted company took some measurement of our goods in the truck and told us to expect its volume to be around 6, 7 CBM.
Just 0, 2 CBM above our estimation, that’s not too bad.
Over 65% of our bill was already paid, we could at last pat ourselves on the back and take off with serenity toward our new life….Or so we thought.

How it becomes even more stressful, then gross

Now that Internic was holding our stuff. They “kinda” made us realised it was hostage…And a much more appropriate time for them to “talk money”:
After “careful” measurement we were informed our shipment inflated overnight by 70% as it was now 11, 4CBM.
After many complaints about “how exactly on earth our shipment could be bigger than our first while moving less”, measurement went down to 9, 3CBM…Still way higher than what it was meant to be, but somehow Internic managed to deflate it by 30%.
Still 40% higher than our estimation and therefore the bill went up:
From 3000 USD to ship 6, 5CBM
we ended up being charged 6300 USD allegedly to ship 9, 3CBM

Paying 110% more for what Internic claimed to be 40% in excess with the volume in the estimation bill.
(After delivery, the French transporter told us that in the worst case scenario, our goods were occupying 8 CBM maximum).

Now, picture yourself in transit, you are looking for a place to live, and you need to adjust to your work as fast and efficiently as possible.
You have your goods taken hostage by a company claiming more than twice the price they agreed upon, as they failed to check by themselves, and because you can no longer be on site and denounce a breach of contract.

Curiously the person we were dealing with at Internic, that very person that reassured us by explaining the contract clauses through our e-mail exchanges was no longer available.

My lady almost got herself an ulcer while dealing with Internic on the phone. Although in distress, she managed to remain equal to herself, kind and exquisitely polite.
She had to endure the lamest arguments to justify the less than low quality of service, the total lack of communication when it actually mattered for us, and the “discrepancies” between the bill estimations and the final fees:
Amongst them Jack Monier told us:
-It was our duty to make sure the moving contractors were respecting their part of the contract, and it was our fault if we did not push them to do their job.
-We have been told we were living in too much of a remote place for them to get a decent moving contractor.
-Our French was perhaps not good enough and we probably fail to understand some contract clauses. (we happened to be French…)
Out of argument, Jack Monier finally just hanged up on her.
Facing sheer mediocrity, the best is probably to keep tracks of things and we strictly limited our contact with Internic to written exchanges from then.

I trust much worse can happen to people, after all we are healthy and we have a job…but still, this itches my sense of justice and fairness.

Still, we are pragmatic.
I suppose such sort of companies are assuming that people facing this sort of behaviour are doing the same calculation:

Comparing
Legal fees to hire solicitors and sue the moving company
+ Settling abroad with the all the difficulties to access info about international rules and get a representative
+ Time and energy to invest in making your case
+ Not being able to recover your goods until the matter is settled and still potentially pay for storage.

Even with the scale of Internic “inflatable fees”, this may remain more expensive than:
Paying the so-called “adjusted bill”.

Trying to walk in Internic shoes on the other end, we are precisely the kind of client they only deal with once anyway, so the impact of “looking bad” is quite limited on the company, and you can assume few people are wealthy enough to push a complain or a claim much further.

As for us, we just tighten dramatically our budget, we had to rely on our friends hospitality to save on the rent and paid the damned company.
Looking for turning that poorly inspired page of our customer history, and eagerly anticipating the glorious moment to tell the tale to billions of people on the wide world web, when no company no longer holds a grip on our belongings.

Will it be the end of the story?
I do not know, but our goods arrived last week:
”Door to door delivery” that was the last point of the contract and (what a fool was I) we reasonably hoped Internic was going to fulfil…

Not even close...

We just found a nice little place right on time to receive our shipment.
I could not afford to be on site because of my work, and I assumed my lady would be more than enough to manage the goods delivery.
So a truck arrived, 6H late on schedule with a total crew of… one driver.
The lad was kind enough to help her with the shipment although his instructions from the company was “this is not our problem, we were not instructed to do that, let her deal with the delivery”.
As it turned out, Internic charged us for a moving company contractor to do the delivery in France but hired a transport company.
Still it took them both 2H to unload a truck that took 4H to 4 movers to load (they are considering creating their own moving company now).

Thank you for having taken the time to read this, I assume that you know by now that I absolutely DO NOT recommend to do ANY business with Internic Moving Services a.k.a. Euro transport: They managed to provide, hands down, the worst service at the highest price we ever dreamed to pay for.
Regardless of the standards (which at the risk of repeating myself were way under not quite satisfying), Internic fees ended up exceeding by far the estimations of its competitors.

So in my humble opinion, now that I can calmly analyse the matter with a tiny bit of perspective, I see only 2 options (maybe 3)
-Either they are utterly incompetents
-Either they are crooks
-Maybe both although I doubt you can survive being an incompetent crook
It is advertised on Internic Moving Services website that they are affiliated members of the B.B.B (Better Business Bureau) as a guaranty of their commercial integrity. After checking (way too late for us) calling the B.B.B in question, it turns out Internic Moving Services a.k.a. Euro transport is NOT an affiliated member whatsoever, which tends to comfort hypothesis #2

Yet, would you consider carefully this advice, I think the money we wasted on them would have be rightly spend experimenting for the greater good of the community.

P.S. We hold our e-mails exchanges at your disposal if you need to check by yourselves.