Loading…
4
Update: I was comparing quotes all wrong for 3 moves before a dispatcher in Amarillo set me straight
For my last 3 moves I kept picking the lowest quote I could find, like $650 from one broker for a trip from Dallas to Denver back in March. That one showed up 9 days late with a dent in my rear door and nobody would answer the phone. Last month a dispatcher I talked to in Amarillo asked me one simple thing: did I ever ask if the company actually owned trucks or just brokered it out? I looked back at my notes and 4 of the 5 cheapest quotes were brokers with zero trucks of their own. So now I care way more about who is physically hauling the car and less about saving $80. Anyone else figure this out the hard way, or am I late to it?
2 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In2 Comments
nelson.vera22d ago
Oh man I feel this in my soul. I got burned on a cheap broker quote from Houston to Phoenix two years ago, car showed up 6 days late and the guy hauling it was some random dude they subbed it out to who barely spoke English. What finally worked for me was calling the actual trucking companies directly in the area I was moving to and asking them flat out if they own their rigs and who would be driving. Took way more phone calls but the last two moves went smooth and the price was only like $100 more. Saving a few bucks upfront is not worth the headache of chasing someone down when your car is sitting somewhere in Oklahoma.
5
evan_cooper7322d ago
That part about the car sitting somewhere in Oklahoma really got me because I had a buddy whose Jeep sat in a Tulsa lot for almost two weeks while the broker kept giving him the runaround. He ended up driving out there himself with a U-Haul trailer just to get it, which cost him way more than the $400 he thought he was saving. @nelson.vera you're right that calling the actual haulers is the move, it's just wild how many middlemen are stacked up in this whole thing. My cousin used to dispatch for a small trucking outfit in Missouri and he said some brokers don't even know where the cars are half the time.
6