PODS or moving container company experience?

[gillamnstr]

Hi all-

Husband, baby and I are moving 2.5 hours away from west Louisiana to closer to New Orleans/Baton Rouge.

We don't have a house in new location yet, but we are 100% selling current house, so it makes sense to pack into a storage container and have it delivered when we're ready.

I've heard mixed PODS reviews, just curious if anyone here has any advice/experience/recommendations.

Thanks in advance!

[therethere]

We used PODS or some similar service to move across country. The ability to load/unload over a few days was great. They even handled the permitting to park the POD on the street in the city we were moving.

My best advice would be to hire movers experienced in packing PODS. At least for the pack up stage. They will do it like a big game of 3D tetris and fill that sucker up to the brim. You'll be able to fit a ton more in each one and have less worries about things breaking during transit.

**Now seeing the names, I think we used U-Pack.

[terran]

We had a generally pretty good experience with PODs. 2000 mile move with 1 month of storage at the far end until we moved into our "final" place. The only snag we hit was that we weren't sure they'd be able to fit in our driveway at the house we were moving from and we didn't want to bother with permits and blocking off spaces for street parking, so we decided to bring our things to the PODs facility, which it turns out they moved the week before our move date and neglected to tell us, so we showed up and no PODs. Had to call and find out where the new facility. Other than that it worked out fine including accessing the POD during storage.

New employer was paying so cost wasn't really a big concern.

You could also check out U-pack. Instead of dropping off a box you put your stuff in a trailer and they bring that. The disadvantage for us, and why we went with PODs is that U-pack parks the trailer in a parking lot, while PODs uses climate controlled facilities which seemed like a better idea since we were storing for a month. If we were just packing, shipping, unpacking we may have gone with U-pack instead.

[Auldtriangle8]

We've used U-Pack twice  (once in 2015 and once in 2018) and both times were great. We did two "relo-cubes" the first time and three of them the most recent. They do tractor trailer space too but I don't have any experience with that. They guarantee which date they drop the cubes off (we chose a Friday) and you get 3 business days to load them up. You call them when the cubes are ready to be picked up, but best practice is to schedule it in advance (we scheduled a Monday pickup). They only did weekend pick-up and drop off. They guarantee arrival within a few days at your destination, or you can pay extra (like $200) for guaranteed date which we did on a Friday because we had friends help unload them on Saturday.
U-Pack is run as part of ABF Freight so like Terran said they don't store the cubes in climate controlled environment. The cubes are high quality though and it poured rain after they were dropped off and the inside was bone dry. There are vents inside to let hot air escape so they weren't too hot when we opened them the next day even though it was about 95 degrees outside (NC summer).
For less money you can drop your stuff off at their storage lot and at your destination pick up from the storage lot. We don't have a truck and it wasn't that much more money to have door to door service so we did that.