Gentle Giant

The Gentle Giant team was fabulous throughout my complicated move from USA to UK. They packed up my house beautifully and put it into storage for 3 years. And then when I eventually moved they packed up my office (100 boxes of books!) and put everything together onto a container for shipping. Gary and Doug ushered me through the process with great knowledge, cheeriness, and charm. It's been a pleasure to work with them. And the firm they work with in the UK was great as well. No delays, everything went terrifically well. I have to admit I expected problems but there weren't any! Janet

Move size: 3 Bedroom Home Service cost: $16000

In May 2018 we moved from our home of 20 years. We spent MANY hours organizing our belongings into various groups as to help ease the move and alleviate the work of unpacking on the other end. We labeled the groupings according to where they would be delivered and stored at our new home. We emphasized with the movers; first the estimator then the foreman and again the actual packers, the importance of properly packing our fragile items that were both priceless and very sentimental. Assuming that Gentle Giant was a professional establishment we believed that we were in good hands. We could not have been more mistaken. Four areas of trouble- we were over charged, our items were delivered with evidence of water damage, boxes were packed haphazardly and most upsetting, many of our delicate valuables were broken in transit due to incorrect packing.(details below if interested in more details)

1) We were overcharged. They attempted to charge us for two trucks, when we used one and a longer distance move than it was in actuality. This was later acknowledged by the company.

2) Our boxes were stored overnight in the truck and scheduled to be delivered the following day. The boxegs were delivered showing evidence of water damage. When we brought this to the teams attention they admitted that there had been a leak in the truck and many of the boxes were damaged. Were they not going to bring this to our attention if we had not noticed??

3) Our boxes were "mispacked" and mislabeled. Unfathomable since we spent so much time organizing the groupings. Just a few examples: our second floor guest bathroom accessories were packed together with items from our downstairs library items-very random! My grandmother's tea cup collection from our living room was packed in all separate boxes-found one teacup with kitchen utensils(still have not found the matching saucer), another teacup was packed with my daughters bedroom knick knacks and the saucer was in with the master bath paraphernalia and I could go on but I think you can get the picture. Things were not packed together and/ or in any kind of order.

4) This is the most upsetting of all the preceding careless mishaps- as we unpacked each box we found many pieces broken which unfortunately included our irreplaceable llardros.

We did take out insurance, so even though we were upset we were confident that Gentle Giant would make things right. Boy were we naive!

Gentle Giant has been a nightmare to work with.
They do not return phone calls in a timely fashion or at all.
It has taken months for us to get any kind of response.

Finally, after many calls and emails a couple of movers came back to our home to unpack the rest of our fragile items. The two men were genuinely surprised by the poor quality of the packing. They opened and witnessed many broken pieces.
They took the pieces to be repaired.
We received an email stating that our pieces were at the repair shop and we would be notified when the restoration was complete.

Recently (mid October) we received another email alerting us that our pieces were had never been delivered to the restoration company and they would like to speak to us to request that we split the cost of the repairs! Unbelievable!

We will never recommend Gentle Giant or trust them again with a move, and neither should you. Look elsewhere. There are many other moving companies who can be trusted to help reduce the stress of moving not add to it!

Move size: 4+ Bedroom Home Service cost: $7000

I worked with Gentle Giant to move my worldly goods from PA to France. Gentle Giant did the actual packing and loading of the container from my home in PA and worked with Rainier for the actual container shipping and another company in France to do the delivery. I worked with Bob Lane at GG and he was fantastic. He coordinated everything and knows the process backwards. He was extremely helpful with all the paperwork, getting me a preliminary quote, organizing a survey, explaining the process,
working with my dates, and staying in contact throughout the
process. GG packed my goods in the container very efficiently so
nothing could shift and to minimize space and costs. Once the goods are on the container, the shipping and delivery are really out of GG's direct control since they are handled by other parties, but Bob kept in touch throughout the process, let me know where my goods were and was absolutely terrific. The GG crew of 3 strong guys in Philly were also great, very professional, calm, polite, strong. They did struggle a little with my baby-grand piano, but in the end sorted it out and were very responsive to any concerns. Overall I had a very good experience working with Bob and GG.

The one weaker link in the process was the delivery company in France which arrived with the container on a truck and no ramp/ lift gate or mechanism to get anything off the container (which is really high off the ground) other than sliding/dropping everything off the back end which was rather worrying, and the crew appeared to be in a tearing hurry but most things survived this!

Service cost: $9100