Sorry about the wall of text but I'm after a bit of advice from anyone that's had to deal with problematic moving companies in the past. We moved from Christchurch to Dunedin last September and hired a company to do all the packing and moving of our belongings down to our new house. We took out insurance from them as our house insurance only provided limited cover, and didn't want any hassle if anything went wrong. At first we thought everything made it to our new house fine, but after a couple of days we noticed that one of the two plastic 60L tubs full of baby clothes (one has 3-6 months, the other 6-9 months) hadn't made it to our new house. I immediately contacted the company and they told me they knew were it would be, another person's belongings was in the back half of the truck and was in long term storage out in Mosgiel, and they'd go out there later that week to look for it. The next week I hadn't heard anything back so I gave them a call, again another promise to go out there that week. This continued for 9 weeks until I finally contacted their General Manager and the following week I finally heard back, they couldn't find it (I don't believe they actually looked). I said that I wasn't happy about it, but there wasn't much else I could do so I'd like to make an insurance claim, they told then me to make a list of what was in the tub and they'll process the claim. We then worked out what was in there, and it quickly added up to $3,000 worth (baby clothes adds up quickly!), I emailed them the details and didn't hear back for 5 weeks. This was over the Christmas/NY period so cut them some slack and with baby #2 quickly approaching I didn't really want to deal with it. I then contacted them 4 weeks ago, their response was they hadn't received the email, they'll look into it. I then contacted them on the Wednesday just gone and they finally got back to me on Friday with the following:

 

Sorry for the delay but have been checking on the wording of the Insurance document.

 

 

 

Clause 6 of the Insurance policy states:

 

 

 

Owner packed Effects 

 

Excludes breakage, scratching, denting,chipping, staining,and tearing of owner packed effects, including trucks, suitcases and the like. Also excludes claims for missing items unless a valued list of contents is supplied by owner prior to commencements of transit.

 

 

 

We are sorry that this item has gone missing while in our care. We have endeavored to locate the missing plastic container but have had no luck. 

I didn't bother responding to him and emailed the GM again:

 

I've finally received a response from XXX and I'm very unhappy with how he's dealt with this. He believes that we're not covered by insurance because we packed the items ourselves, however it was your staff that decided to just ship the clothes in the plastic tub they were being stored in (they were in our garage waiting for baby #2) instead of doing what we paid your company to do and pack everything for moving - we gave no instruction to ship the clothes in the tubs or queried about it. I also don't have much faith in how hard he looked for the clothes, it was 10 weeks of me hassling and after that period of time I have to wonder how much effort was made, and then a further 9 week response time for the insurance claim is completely unacceptable.

Has anyone ever taken this further in situations like this? I've battled insurance companies before (I'm from Chch!) but I'm not sure if it's worth the effort and stress for $3,000.