Reseña #861

Oh well, where should I start… I placed an order with Ecoparcel for sending my personal belongings (5 30-kg boxes) from Lithuania to the Netherlands in the beginning of August 2017. From the confirmed order page on the Ecoparcel site I found out that my boxes will be delivered by GLS. The boxes were picked up as scheduled on 14 August. On the scheduled pick-up day, I managed to GLS office in Lithuania and they gave me the exact time at which the courier would come over to pick up my belongings, and the courier did arrive at the time specified by the company, which was nice. After that, the “fun” part begins: - Ecoparcel tracking system is virtually non-existent. The status of my order at their site is still “prepared for collection”. Good thing is that the order page provided me with alternative tracking numbers used by GLS, so I could track my boxes via their site. - 4 boxes made it to the Netherlands on the late evening of 18 August and were delivered to me in Amsterdam on 22 August; one of them was, apparently, damaged during transportation and the hole in it was “fixed” by putting additional layers of sticky tape. A few things got broken in those boxes, but nothing too serious. - 5th box for some reason didn’t make it to the Netherlands and according to GLS tracking system was still in their depot in Germany. On 20 August I wrote to Ecoparcel service (via help.ecoparcel.eu) requesting an update on that 5th box. - In the meantime, I was also in contact with GLS office in the Netherlands about that 5th box, and they said that most probably, there was some problem with the sticker on the box. They were not able to help me out as the last known location of the box was Germany and that I should be in touch with those who placed an order on my behalf. - On 22 August, there was no reply from Ecoparcel so I repeated my request. - I tried to contact GLS in Germany, but they replied that they only deal with the parcels that are to be delivered to an address in Germany. - On 23 August, I wrote to Ecoparcel via their Facebook page. This helped and I got the reply on Facebook the same day saying that “the problem was that this parcel was no where to deliver because there was not provided any delivery address”. Ecoparcel representative wrote to me that they requested the delivery to my address in Amsterdam. - On the same day, 23 August, I receive an answer from Ecoparcel representative via help.ecoparcel.eu stating that they requested an explanation from GLS as to why my box is still in Germany. At this point, it starting to become very confusing as I am receiving two different stories from Ecoparcel representative on Facebook and from Ecoparcel representative on help.ecoparcel.eu. - On 24 August, I receive a reply from the Ecoparcel representative on help.ecoparcel.eu, stating that “As per GLS Germany. we will need to start searches.”, which basically means that my box is lost. I was requested to provide detailed description of the box itself and its contents in order to make the search easier. I did it the same day. Ecoparcel went silent for another six days. - On 29 August, I contacted them again via their Facebook page (it seems that this method works better than trying to reach them via help.ecoparcel.eu). - I got a reply on 30 August stating the following: they contacted the GLS depot in Germany, the depot replied that the parcel label was not readable; Ecoparcel provided my address in Amsterdam and requested the delivery of the 5th box to that address; but GLS depot answered that they “can not change anything and parcel should be returned to the shipper”. My reply to that was that the shipper of this parcel is me, so it doesn’t make sense to send it back to Lithuania as I don’t live there anymore. I also underlined that the information they provide to me is very confusing: on Facebook Ecoparcel said that the location of the box was known, only the label was not readable, and on help.ecoparcel.eu Ecoparcel said the box is misplaced/lost. - I didn’t get a clarifying answer to that point and was requested again to provide a detailed description of the box and its contents “to identify which parcel is mine”, which led me to a conclusion that the box is actually lost. - On 5 September, I got a confirmation that the “parcel is now officially considered lost, and no more searches will be started as the previous ones were unsuccessful” and that I am “entitled to get the compensation of up to 100/300EUR. In order to claim it, please write an email to claims at ecoparcel.eu”. - On 6 September, I submitted my insurance claim with detailed description of contents of the box and confirmed prices of some of the things. Today is 14 September and I haven’t received any reply yet. I have serious doubts about this box being actually “lost”, as this box, out of all five boxes, contained my most valuable personal belongings. That was a good lesson to me, and now I will think twice about which provider of this type of services I should choose. I hope this will be a good lesson to Ecoparcel too, because, apparently, they can hardly influence their partners, which actually perform the delivery. In a number of replies to me, Ecoparcel used the following phrase “we want to assure you that this is not something that happens often, and we view each incident like this very seriously.” I hope they finally start taking this situation very seriously and reply to my insurance claim.