“This company has caused me to live the worse week of my life. I arranged my personal belongings to be shipped DOOR TO DOOR from the UK to Canada. They gave me a quote of 3215 GBP. They sent a 20ft container which I loaded with some hired help myself. I paid them subsequently and sat comfortably awaiting the arrival of my belongings. On the 18 of July, I received the bill of laden. I didn't think much about it thinking it was routine. But then I received an email from a Peter Inoubhou; a Maersk Canada representative who left us a message to arrange to pay all inland charges regarding our container in order to avoid demaurrage charges. That's when we became worried. My wife and I were puzzled as to why they would be contacting us about inland charges. So we called him back and that is when our nightmare started. This gentleman informed us that, Maersk Canada does not do residential deliveries so we would have to clear our container ourselves, pay all the inland charges and get a bonded trucker to deliver the container to our residence. we had a lot of questions for this gentleman but he kept saying that our shipper in the UK should have known that residential deliveries was not something MAERSK Canada does. He wasn't able to help us any further. He only promised to send an urgent to our shipper in the UK that a residential delivery was not possible.
To make matters worse, Freight Agency had also billed some of destination and terminal fees on the bill of laden collectable from us and Maersk was holding our feet to the fire. we were getting emails from everybody in the company; warning us of fees and charges and the use of terminology that we didn't even understand. When we contacted Freight Agency, we spoke to a lady called Kate, she asked us to send her a copy of the invoice; which we did. Come to find out, they only paid half of the fees; leaving us with 500 USD still to pay. We had just arrived in Canada a little under 2 weeks. Our credit card was maxed out since we hadn't opened bank accounts yet. We had 3 small children to feed and there was all the extra costs of being in a new country. It took us 3 days to find a suitable payment option that Maersk Canada will accept. All this time, there were port charges being levied on our container at the cost of 350 dollars a day and nobody was telling us even though we had made 4 trips to the office of Maersk's office. Meanwhile, Freight Agency was silent; offering no assistance to us at all. we were on our own. Its August 2nd and at the cost of 3000 dollars above the 3300 gbp we paid to Freight Agency, we may finally get our container delivered to our new home. That is all the money we had put aside for living expenses. They have caused us untold and inexplicable amount of stress and driven us to near destitution. But rather accepting responsibility and going all they can to help us out of the mess they created, they have been shirking their responsibility. I am disgusted that a company that prides itself for being in business for 30 years can behave this way. Where is your due diligence to your customers Freight Agency? Do the right thing! Watch out for this company folks!”
