TERRIBLE customer service from Biddulphs

I have had a terrible experience with this company. We moved from Knysna to Durban on 8 January this year. We had to pay the full amount of R55 0000 in advance, which included a full packing service and R18 000 for insurance.

The packers came 2 days ahead of the move, but arrived very late each day and left early. On the day of the move the truck arrived very late and subsequently they only finished packing the truck at 9 o'clock that night after the had brought in additional teams to help.

This might sound petty, but to me it is the principle: the packer took our box of chocolates that our neighbour had sent over to say goodbye to us without even asking. We also gave them a lot of things that we did not want to take with us. This also included 15 litres of petrol from our generator that could not be transported.

On the day that the truck arrived in Durban (12 April) they only turned up after 1 o'clock in the afternoon to start unpacking, apparently because the truck's battery was dead.

The staff were constantly bickering and they unloaded things so fast that I was unable to mark all the boxes off the list as they were unpacked. The boxes were also not clearly marked by the packer, so we were unsure which rooms they had to go to.

At about 4 o'clock I started to become worried about the fact that none of the boxes were being unpacked and when I inquired I was told that they did not know they had to. We were then informed that a team of ladies would probably be sent to unpack on the Monday. No-one arrived on Monday and my husband phoned. he was then told that it would probably happen on Wednesday, but this also didn't happen. Eventually we unpacked ourselves, but we still had all the boxes standing in our house.

We phoned and sent several emails to enquire about when the boxes would be fetched. Eventually, after I had threatened to write a bad review, they fetched the boxes and some of the broken items they were going to try and fix on 26 MARCH.

Many electronic items such as chargers, my chrome box and the DSTV wifi connecter went missing as well as 2 rechargeable lamps. All the plants I wanted to take with me were destroyed and many items broken.

The groceries and cleaning materials were also so badly packed that there was a huge amount of spillage. I was informed that the groceries would not be covered by the insurance as liquids are not supposed to be transported, to which I responded that their employees were responsible for the packing and they should have know what should be packed and what not.

I was also informed that the rechargeable lamps would not be covered.

we are still waiting for the 'fixed' items to be returned and the claim to be finalised and it has been more than 3 months. This is absolutely terrible customer service and it has caused us an enormous amount of additional stress.