PODS San Antonio - Moving and Storage

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Our intention was to move our stuff in to three large PODS, store the PODS for approximately three months, then have PODS move them to our new home in Austin. We got a quote for storage and the move using a central Austin zip code since we hadn't bought a house there yet and weren't sure of the exact location. Ultimately we bought a home 2 miles from said zip code and CLOSER to the San Antonio location than the original zip code we used. This is an important detail because when I called in May to make arrangements to move the PODS (which we had packed ourselves thoroughly and carefully in preparation for the move) PODS told us that the move would not cost $4800.00- almost $3000.00 more than the original quoted amount! I tried in vain to get a better, more reasonable quote but I was told that the move was now a and quot;long distance move and not a local oneand quot; and therefore there was and quot;nothing they could do.and quot; I felt that they had me between a rock and a hard place since all of my belongings were stored in their facility, and we obviously needed to move our things to Austin. Additionally, we were told that we could only have access to our PODS with 24 hours notice. There were two times during the three months that we needed to access our containers- to remove items that we needed to give away, and to add some boxes we still needed to store. In every case, including the day we arrived to remove the contents for our move, the containers hadn't even been brought out of the facility. We are fairly certain, during the course of our two day move, that they remained in the parking lot overnight and were not returned to the secure storage facility. The bottom line is that they wanted us to give them 24 hours, but they NEVER had the PODS out when asked, and we always had to wait for them when we arrived. Other issues- they were unable to store the PODS on our driveway as planned, so we ended up having to load and move one POD at a time (may have been our oversight, but we got no guidance from the company on this and it was unexpected and inconvenient.) We also noticed a LOT of dust on everything that was stored. We understand this is a part of storing items, but it was an excessive amount of dust to be sure. It took weeks and weeks to get all of our things clean.
Basically our experience with PODS had lots of unpleasant surprises- most specifically the change in moving price, and the unreliable access to our PODS. We finally hired another company to empty the PODS, load our stuff on to their truck, and move it to Austin- for a fraction of the price PODS was going to charge. PODS tries to sell itself on convenience and value, however we experienced neither. We will never do business with them in the future.

Overall, it went very well. They were very professional. They delivered and picked up on time at both locations. There was no damage as a result of using these PODS. We would definitly use them again.