From France to Edinburgh

First of all, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. To start with, what was the motive behind this decision? And where did you decide to move?

We have lived in France for 2 years, but we had trouble integrating there and accepting the migration politics. We have decided to change residence to another country, where the legalization process and obtaining a skilled worker visa is clearer, predictive, fast and simple.

We started to search for companies which can help us with moving our personal stuff to another country and stumbled upon your service which made it really simple and gave us few companies to choose from straight away and did all the initial communication work and quote requests for ourselves – that decreased the amount of stress we already had and simplified things for us 🙂

When you started preparing for the move, how did the mover research go? We know how hard finding the right company can be.

We have done some prior research as well before we stumbled upon your website, also we compared a few quotes given by the services recommended by your website. This mover has been the cheapest, had lots of good reviews on Trustpilot (and fresh ones), but also they were the fastest to provide the quote and we were impressed that they responded to us straight away at night – this was a level of service we didn’t expect and it really surprised us.

They went an extra mile and gave us lots of clarifications needed to take a decision, so overall we were attracted by a combination of factors: the lowest price, good reviews, great communication and service – they went extra mile.

The big day – How did it go? Did everything go smoothly?

The move didn’t go as planned. The provider uses FedEx in France as their local provider who collects boxes, and FedEx simply didn’t come at the needed date – they told them we weren’t at home. But Sherpr has apologized and helped to reschedule to another day.

FedEx came the other day, but they didn’t collect the boxes – they said their car is small and won’t be able to take 22 boxes. Sherpr told us that they had passed to FedEx all the quantity of boxes and their dimensions and that FedEx knew this info, that it wasn’t Sherpr’s fault. We have rescheduled the pickup to another day and from the 3rd attempt FedEx collected the boxes.

The delivery went well, however, it was done via 2 parts – firstly only 1 of 22 boxes was delivered, but the other boxes were delivered later in a few days (maybe it was a customs issue, Sherpr has contacted us and the movers and has solved the issue fast).

Definitely learned some things! After your experience, what advice would you give to others?

• Before packing, read advice on the packaging (which one to use), and prohibited items, so you don’t pack something which is prohibited and have to repack later.
• When packing, write down in some spreadsheet exactly how many items and which ones are in each specific boxes, and the dimensions of that boxes. You’ll need it later when you need to fill in the Customs declarations (in the UK at least, based on our experience), when you’ll need to write down how many socks, coats, shoes etc. you are sending :)) And you’ll need the number of boxes and their dimensions to get a quote from the delivery companies.
• Don’t leave the boxes sending till the last moment, because the collector company (like FedEx) cannot come on the designated day and you’ll need to reschedule for some later day. It’s better to send your boxes a bit earlier, to avoid situations when you already left the country and you have to delegate someone else to help you with their sending.
• If you have lots of heavy boxes, search for companies who can pick up the boxes straight from your door – so that you won’t need to deliver them to some collection point yourselves.
• If you are moving to a new country and you don’t have an apartment there yet, where you could send your boxes, you can find a storage beforehand and send your boxes there.

Last question – Did the price meet your expectations?

The final costs were cheaper than we expected.