Low prices may be attractive to people moving house on a tight budget, but hidden costs in the fine print of moving contracts can soon make an apparently cheap deal a false economy.
Inexperienced or disreputable companies can also lead consumers into disaster, as in the case of East Asia Movers, which two years ago attracted a flood of complaints over damaged deliveries and international shipments that never even left the company's warehouse in Hong Kong.
'There's a lot of smaller companies around and they could be good companies trying to get a start, or they could be not so good,' says Jim Thompson of moving company Crown.
Consumers should check whether a quote is guaranteed within a certain range, so that on moving day they do not get a shock when the company says the volume of their furniture is much higher than originally estimated and the charge is also higher.
For international moves, transit times supplied may refer to the time your container spends at sea, not the time it takes to get from door to door.
Customers should be particularly careful when looking at insurance policies.
'People just assume the moving company's going to take the full liability, and that's just not the case . . . We always counsel our customers to buy insurance,' Mr Thompson says.
