I recently moved from Canberra to London, and had an unpleasant experience. Australasian Removals were fine... until they had my stuff, and then the standard slipped.

They would ignore my emails for up to two weeks at a time, and they refused to provide me with a receipt specifying how many boxes had been collected. I emailed and emailed and emailed asking for some kind of inventory, and finally, over a month after my goods were picked up they provided one (long after it could be verified against anything except my own list, of course).

Oh, and then it gets better. It turns out that there were all these forms needed by UK customs including a detailed list of the contents of each of the boxes, which they hadn't provided to me. This caused me delays at customs and extra fees. They claimed that I was somehow supposed to know what was in each labeled box, even though they had labeled them after collecting them from my storage unit in Canberra.

I complained about this and received such incredibly rude email replies from the MD, who was also very rude on the phone to my mother. In these, he threatened to charge me extra money claiming that I hadn't given my credit card details and that I was delaying! NOTE - I had provided it long before they even took my belongings, and had emailed them again to the woman who I had been dealing with. Apart from which, I had not been the source of any delay! I even had to get my mother in Australia to ring them up three times just to get a copy of the documents. Obviously I told him that he had absolutely no legal basis to add additional charges onto my card and that I wouldn't stand for it, so he let that one go fairly quickly.

So, I put up a negative review on www.shipping-international.com, only to discover that the moving companies there can remove negative reviews, leaving only the (I imagine very rare) positive ones left. I've seen a number of other negative reviews appear and disappear after a day or so since I started checking.

Also, the boxes were packed so badly in the container that the company at the other end even commented on the incompetence of Austrelo.

Not happy. Don't use this company if you have any desire to be treated with respect.