ABF Freight System - They are certainly not trade show freight experts

One of our clients suggested ABF Freight as their tradeshow freight provider, but it is clear that tradeshow services aren't their strong suit. Our contract listed 7/5 as the necessary delivered by date. Payment was issued before this date. Our client called on 7/8 saying that items had no arrived. ABF's Louisville center was closed of course because it was a Sunday, but there was absolutely no one else available to contact. Trade shows often begin or at least have build-up days on the weekend so it is ridiculous to say you can specialize in trade shows and not even be available during typical trade show hours.

Monday morning, when I was finally able to reach Kristin at the Louisville location, she informed me that the delivery had been refused by the hotel. Also, she said that there was no one at the hotel during lunch hours on a Friday to receive it, which is hard to believe considering the Louisville Marriott Downtown is a hotel that has reception 24/7. If this was actually the case, ABF still dropped the ball by not contacting me as soon as there was an issue with the initial delivery.

Instead, I had to call in and inquire about it. Then I was informed that since the delivery was refused, it was not on the truck to be delivered on Monday either. They needed a re-confirmation from us before sending it back out to deliver. Again, none of this was automatically relayed to me. It was all after we noticed nothing had been delivered. Kristin mentioned that there would be a $150 re-delivery fee so I opted to have our regular, preferred shipper (TWI) pick it up from ABF in Louisville.

TWI was able to retrieve and deliver the pro within hours. I love them. This is exactly why we use their services 9 times out of 10.

As far as final billing with ABF, there was no direction from any of the 3 individuals that I worked with on this project. We had no idea where to find final invoices, and no one responded to our emails inquiring about such. We are going to pay this ridiculous $150 additional fee for something they never re-delivered, but we will never be using ABF Freight again. They dropped the ball at every stage of the process possible.