PODS® Reviews
I used Pods for a cross-country move. So easy to use them, you get very up front and reasonable pricing broken down into payments. The containers are a bit on the small side is the only thing to pay close attention to. I was able to fit the equivalent of a 1 bedroom apartment into the largest 16 foot container. They dropped it off without issue when they said they would, picked it up again on time and having the ability to store it included in the price for 30 days is fantastic. This has been so simple using Pods!
As a consumer I do not have the intimate knowledge of how much furniture and/or boxes a pod can hold. I looked to the company to provide me with their expertise. This is their industry after all. Wow. What a mistake! I provided the pods representative with the square footage of my home, number of bedrooms, all other rooms & basement. I also had an approximate weight of my belongings. With all of that information I expected them to make a knowledgeable estimate as to the number of pods I should need. They estimated three to four 16 foot pods. Wow. The pods must really hold a lot! Well, not so fast. Come to find out, I actually needed EIGHT pods. Yes, DOUBLE their industry knowledge estimate. What a major fail!! I am so disappointed in their inability to perform their job on the behalf of their customer- me. So, if they say you need two pods order four!! Or you’ll be stuck like me at 6pm not able to get more pods and running around trying to track down 26 foot trucks to finish your move!! Very frustrating.
PODS completely messed up my container delivery. They did not inform me that they do not deliver in street parking in Miami-Dade county until the truck showed up with the POD, even though I informed the sales representative two weeks prior, two days before, and the driver on the day of the delivery that it was to go on the street. I had to take time out to procure parking from the city, which approved the parking space rental. When I contacted the city to tell them of the parking space situation, they tried to work with me to get space for the POD in a lot, but before I finished with them, the driver just drove away with the POD. I then had to incur the cost of renting two parking spaces for 3 days, plus U-HAUL rental to transfer my stuff from my apt. to the POD warehouse, plus extra time for movers. That no one could have provided me with this information ahead of time is unacceptable.
Drop-off and Pick-up was easy, however communication regarding the timeline of shipping the Pod to the state we were moving to, and then again delivery to our new residence was very lacking. As a result, our Pod was delivered to us almost two weeks after we had already moved in during which time we had nothing in our home. This caused a lot of problems and additional expenses, though the company did waive the fee for the extra two weeks it took and apologized for the communication errors.
Superior customer service even when they came to pick up the PODS and an inconsiderate neighbor had parked next to the POD and left for the weekend. I love the idea of packing and storing one time vs the rental truck and storage space move (3 or more times touching every single item) not to mention the wear and tear on your belongings. I had professional movers pack a 2 bedroom home into a 16’ & 7’ POD in 4 1/4 hours.
Everything was going great until I called one week in advance to schedule our POD pickup. I needed it picked up on Aug 27th, one day after loading it, they informed me the earliest they could pick it up was Sept 4th. This all cod have been avoided had the booking agent for POD's informed me at the time of registration to go ahead and schedule pickup, because I knew the date. This caused some heartburn with our land lord, and good have been totally avoided. Then, it is so hard to contact customer service, 3 emails later and I finally got a response, with little help. Still have not had our POD picked up.
Moved with a 7' and 16' POD -- the 7' came through just fine, the 16' was a total mess. I was present when it was dropped off and the deload from the truck was extremely wobbly (much moreso than the 3 other deloads I've seen) and likely resulted in the movement of some of our belongings. We have multiple chairs that have small areas of damage as a result. I do think the POD was packed very tightly, but honestly with that much motion in the deload process, I'm not surprised things moved as much as they did.