Major shipping problem!
 

Hello to you all,

My girlfriend and I are currently stuck in a very bad situation. We made a poor choice when it came to a shipping company, the company is Russells Freight.

Long story short, we are now in Buenos Aires and our bikes are at Heathrow airport awaiting payment before they will be sent. We originally made our first payment to our agents on day of delivery so that they could book our flight with the intended airline. Ever since then we have found the service extremely poor. They will not answer our calls, long delays on replying to emails if even bothering at all and no way of even contacting the manager.
They never bothered with getting a Dangerous goods certificate and marked our goods as charity. This got us stuck with an extra 720 pound invoice. They got the certificate but decided to rebuild our crates after opening our old ones to inspect our goods. Instead of using the same crates they built new ones, this time being 3 times the size of our original. We were never notified that this would be happening. We were led to believe they would be recrated into the original crates we had dropped them off to the airport in. Anyone knows when it comes to air freight this price was going to be astronomical! So today we landed in Argentina hoping to receive some good news from the cowboys freighters that our bikes are on there way. The answer was no but for another invoice for 1056 pounds due to the oversize of the crates.
We feel like we have been completely screwed by this company and they have been nothing but a headache to deal with. AMI (Air Menzies)tried helping us but could only do so much as they are not allowed to deal directly with the customer, only the agent.

We have put this out there to see if anyone in the community has any words of wisdom or help. Being so far away is making any contact with these people even more difficult.

Your help would be much appreciated.

Mark

Big Empty
 

Hi Mark
I'm really sorry to hear of your problems. I don't know Russells freight but as you say. Not good. We are Moto freight at Heathrow. I've been airfreighting bikes now for years. I don't want you to feel bad with what I'm going to say but if it can help in any way then that's will be good. Firstly. How much money have you actually handed over to Russels? I've just run a credit check on them and it didn't come out very well. They've been trading since beginning of 2010. their net worth is a negative figure and they have a CCJ against them. If you haven't actually handed over too much then it might be worth it to cut you loss and take then bikes off them.
Otherwise talk to the MD Ronnie Chinenyanga. their website give the phone number as +44(0)844 8845973. The only address that I can find is in Ipswich. Did you drop the bikes near Heathrow? If so let me have the address and I'll try to go to see what's going on.
I'm not sure what's best. It sound like the bikes are with AMI and they are exclusively a wholesaler. I don't want to expand too far on an open forum but if you let me have a direct email address We can communicate directly and see if I can help. I can't say any more on an open forum .
Best regards. Roddy Warriner roddy@motofreight.com +44(0)8452417055

Big Empty
 

Hi Mark

I've done a little more homework - Please either email me or call

Cheers

Roddy

Big Empty: VERY sorry to hear about this, there are too many bad shipping stories.

When you've got it sorted - and hopefully Roddy can help - please be sure to add your story to the HU Shipping database here so everyone can benefit from your experience.

Roddy - and everyone - you can contact most people by clicking their name, and you will then get a dropdown list with email or Private Message contacts - so long as they've enabled this secure system - you have, haven't you? Check your "User Options"!

Bikes Received!
 

Thanks to Roddy and Grant for your replies. Picked up the bikes in BA on Wednesday. We will be posting shortly on the shipping page about our experience so hopefully people can learn from our experience. Definitely worth doing a bit of research on the company you are thinking of using. If we had done that we would probably not have ended up in the situation we were in. Just happy that we have our bikes back. Formalities at the airport in BA were straightforward. There is no reason you can't do this yourself, even if you speak next to no Spanish! People there are generally very helpful. Now we hit the road - bring on South America :taz: