[Closed] Parcel Force lost a bike

Hmm, that's worrying as I've just arranged a parcelforce collection for a bike myself...

I've sent several things with PF in the past without issue though, it sounds like you have been very unlucky this time. Maybe keep a lookout on FB marketplace / ebay for your bike.

Email their CEO? (sorry I had to)

How long has it taken them to get your refund?

My experience of ParcelForce has been positive the one time something went missing and although these things can take time it was still a million times quicker than other couriers. With the current delays affecting all couriers, I am sure they have to allow some time to see if it just turns up a few days later and they must be bombarded with calls and emails because deliveries are a day late and everyone suddenly panics.

Plus presumably you are getting your money back and they have actually declared it as lost which is one up on what you would get out of the vast majority of couriers!!!

What more do you want from them?

I got told by the guy at the post office that I was wasting time about the broken picture frame as they would just say insufficient packaging. The split the wood of the frame, not a little scratch. It takes a large localised for to splinter wood. Gits. Never again. Just wish there was someone who might be better.

Plus presumably you are getting your money back

Judging by the op you presume wrong, he is only insured for 100 quid!

* getting the money back you insured it for 😉

Can’t blame a courier for being out of pocket if you don’t pay for adequate insurance. It would be nice if it didn’t go missing but stuff happens sadly

Yup as mentioned in my first post I'm an idiot - joys of hindsight - was in haste and guess grumpy that I'd paid extra for using parcel force (courier of choice cheaper but couldn't pick up for 8 days!) and sold bike for a lot less than I might have liked. So far Parcelforce always been spot on. So there is a lesson there. And now waiting to see what Parcel force do. But just ranting and feel that losing a whole bike within 24 hours takes some doing.....

Can’t blame a courier for being out of pocket if you don’t pay for adequate insurance

I'm sure it's in their T&Cs but it seem immoral for a business to exclude liability for their own negligence unless you pay them extra.

https://www.parcelforce.com/conditions-of-carriage says:

12.1 Subject to the provisions of these Conditions, Parcelforce Worldwide shall pay compensation to the Customer for loss or damage caused by its negligence or that of those for whom it is vicariously liable, and a refund in the case of delay.

13.1 The following limits currently apply to compensation for loss or damage payable under these Services: express24 £100

You've paid for a service, under the Consumer Rights Act that service should be performed with reasonable skill and care, and they can't exclude that liablity.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15/section/57/enacted

But IANAL, and there may be legal precedent.

Greybeard this is very much appreciated. Thank you.

It could still turn up.
I have had the go ahead to claim for 6 cartons lost by UPS the day after they had randomly returned them to us without scanning.
Have had 2 pallets go missing and declared lost to turn up months later, due to carrier covering labels.
All it take is for barcode to fall of or fail to scan and it will bo longer exist untill someone bothers to read what might be written on there.

immoral for a business to exclude liability for their own negligence unless you pay them extra

Jokers eh!

Last time they lost something of mine showed just how useless they are. Phoned them next day, could tell them exactly what it was (distinctive expensive item had "come out of its packaging" so should be very obvious), knew the driver's name, had only been through one depot which was the one I phoned. Could you please have a look? No, put a claim in sir!

I have a business that is all about delivering consultancy, if something goes wrong even if it's not always our fault.. we go to great lengths to fix things at our expense.

I dont see this in other business's

Isn't this just how insurance works? If you've valued your car at £1,000 and then written it off, you can't really complain that it was actually worth £4k and how do you get your money?

It's shit and I feel your pain, and of course a (relatively) respected courier shouldn't lose your goods. But this is why insurance exists, you wouldn't send a diamond ring in a Jiffy bag via first-class post.

I have to agree, if you'd have insured for the higher value, you'd have been charged more for the sending of the item.

Parcelforce online require you to enter a value for your parcel, then automagically give you the optional cost uplift for insuring it for the full amount if over £100. so unless you went through the local post office and were not advised of the insurance options then you don't have much hope sorry.

If you’ve valued your car at £1,000 and then written it off, you can’t really complain that it was actually worth £4k and how do you get your money?

You can value your £4000 car at £10,000 or any other figure. The insurance company will only pay in their view what the market value is. Not what you actually put down on form.

You can value your £4000 car at £10,000 or any other figure. The insurance company will only pay in their view what the market value is. Not what you actually put down on form.

Well kinda, but no. If you value it at £500 and ask for £10,000 when stolen you think they'll go for that ? The policy will be decided on the cars value as well as other things.

If you insured your car third party only, and someone else wrote it off, you'd expect them to pay.

But insurance isn't what parcel force call it. I still feel excluding liability for their negligence is wrong but if you look at it as them charging a higher rate to deliver valuable items, they have a point.

But insurance isn’t what parcel force call it. I still feel excluding liability for their negligence is wrong but if you look at it as them charging a higher rate to deliver valuable items, they have a point.

Well I suspect the OP will get a refund on his postage fee, so in one sense they are admiting liability. It's the consequential liability where it all gets complicated, value of the item lost, time spent chasing it etc etc. Pretty normal to draw the line at the fee paid for the product / service and any subsequent losses are for insurance to deal with.

I have a business that is all about delivering consultancy, if something goes wrong even if it’s not always our fault.. we go to great lengths to fix things at our expense.

I dont see this in other business’s

There is a very big difference between a company serving a small number of high value clients and one serving 10s of millions of very low value clients. I do hope your consultancy business isn't in business management 😉

I know it's too late for the OP, but Paisley Freight seem good for sending bikes and wheels etc. Good prices too compared with the likes of ParcelFarce.

Paisley Freight

I still feel excluding liability for their negligence is wrong but if you look at it as them charging a higher rate to deliver valuable items, they have a point.

They work under CMR and RHA (parcel force being royal mail may also be covered under the relevant acts of Parliament pertaining to RM) , these establish their legal obligations, minimum values of recompense of its there fault, minimum levels of service etc.

Their requirement is to deliver x% of parcels on time and undamaged (I forget the number, but think its about 98%). That's the service they're selling is set out in legislation.

Their legal liability for compensation is about £8.00 per kg under CMR (which covers broadly speaking, everything crossing a border in Europe) our about £1.30 per kg under RHA.

That they cover you for £50 or £5000 is done off their own back.

It's highly unlikely to be knicked. It'll be sat in the corner of the wrong warehouse having been misrouted, under a sorting machine having fallen from the conveyor, sat in the manual handling bay behind 1000s of other items waiting for Bob to come back from isolation etc. it's not difficult to loose containers during shipping, one parcel when you're handling 10k a day at a single small site let alone a major sorting depot is easy. When that parcel is a pita size so doesn't feed through the handling machines properly, gets easily knocked from conveyors and so on it's especially so.

There's a good reason most carriers won't take things the size of a bike box and it's exactly because they're much easier to loose or damage and a huge pita to handle.

They must find a bloody massive box eventually though ? It's not like it falls between a machine and no-one can reach it..

I got told by the guy at the post office that I was wasting time about the broken picture frame as they would just say insufficient packaging. The split the wood of the frame, not a little scratch. It takes a large localised for to splinter wood. Gits. Never again. Just wish there was someone who might be better.

Yip. I got sick of sending out framed artwork for it to arrive smashed to pieces, then finding out that the Ts & C's mean the extra insurance you took out isn't worth the paper its printed on.

@WorldClassAccident - I have a solution.

I had a big piece of artwork to send a couple of weeks ago - a 1.5 metre x 60cm printed alloy sheet - for a member of this very parish. It was to go from here down to Surrey. I estimated its chances of arriving undamaged with a volume courier (I've tried them all and they're all as bad as each other) as somewhere between none and "ha ha haaaaaa... are you serious?!"

I was worrying about it when my mate put me onto a site (www.shiply.com) which he'd just used to transport some antique furniture from London. The site links you with a network of private couriers. You put the details of what you want transporting - artwork, a bike, furniture - and they put your details out and private couriers quote for the job.

My first experience using it couldn't have been better. Picked up at the very minute they said it would be, transported from A to B, without going through depot's, being thrown around, and arrived the next day, to the minute they said it would, all intact, undamaged and in one piece.

It cost me £67 for a next day (undamaged) delivery from Lancashire to Surrey. A next day with Parcel Farce would have been £30+, I reckon.

If you're sending something fragile or high value and you don't want it going missing or turning up smashed to bits, this is the way to go.

There’s a good reason most carriers won’t take things the size of a bike box and it’s exactly because they’re much easier to loose or damage and a huge pita to handle

SCS managed to lose half of my son's corner sofa, not entirely sure how that is possible

Isn’t this just how insurance works? If you’ve valued your car at £1,000 and then written it off, you can’t really complain that it was actually worth £4k and how do you get your money?

It’s shit and I feel your pain, and of course a (relatively) respected courier shouldn’t lose your goods. But this is why insurance exists, you wouldn’t send a diamond ring in a Jiffy bag via first-class post.

This is more like you insuring your £4k car for £1k and the insurance company turning up in the middle of the night and setting it on fire, then only offering you the £1k even though it's their fault entirely.

I’m sure it’s in their T&Cs but it seem immoral for a business to exclude liability for their own negligence unless you pay them extra.

Completely agree, they've got one job to do, it's what they're paid to do. The fact we have to insure against their own incompetence is ****.

Imagine how many Rolex's, diamond rings, priceless works of art and £10k road bikes would be alleged to 'go missing' if you didn't have to prove postage and the value of the item you are sending.

Imagine the amounts that would be fraudulently claimed if all you had to do was phone Parcel Farce or whoever and say 'I posted a Pinarello Uber Carbon Cock bike worth £8k and you've lost it so I want my money back please'.

I miss good old Red Star.

Just as an FYI parcel force max standard parcel size is a little smaller than a regular bike box. You'd need to make sure your paying for a Large parcel, this combined with the weight and insurance provided often means it's more economical to go with some one else ....

Based on the op's requirements of a £350 bike, your local postoffice would charge you £39.60 for a 48hr service with the correct weight and box size....

And I am surprised no one has picked up on this before:

*there

At least you can get responses out of their customer service - I'm trying to get in touch with hermes currently, and, well...

Try your household insurance?

I used PF to send a guitar, properly packed, in a guitar flight case and it turned up with headstock snapped off. PF refused to pay out saying that I'd packed it incorrectly, even though it was insured for the full value! Claimed on my M&S household insurance, who paid out straight away.

Currently waiting on a return to Superdrug to move beyond the Leeds sorting office. It's been there for 4 weeks according to the tracker......

SCS managed to lose half of my son’s corner sofa, not entirely sure how that is possible

It's down the back of another sofa!

My experience is also that PF are totally woeful.

It also seems like taking the piss when they want you to pay more for insurance for when their negligence loses (or has stolen - not really lost are they) what I'm sending.

At least you can get responses out of their customer service – I’m trying to get in touch with hermes currently, and, well…

Yup. Trying to chase a missing item I sold on here. After a point every time you go to their checking system it says they have the parcel. True, but it had t moved for 3 weeks. The you start a chase, get a reference number but nobody gets back to you so you get on the phone and wait for 45 minutes but have to get some work done so hang up. Repeat 3 times before you get through to someone and then they apologise for the delay getting in touch but they admit it is probably lost. Grrrr.
Parcel Force on the other hand have collected 2 valuable and heavy (25kg) guitar amps from me. Delivered them the next day despite them being on 48hrs delivery and seemed totally brilliant.

...just an anecdote, only vaguely related.
I worked for 6 months in a Royal Mail sorting office in 1987. 5pm-9pm, and the must-do task for the team was to sort all 1st class mail into ready-to-deliver piles for the postie next morning.
IF we finished in time, we then had to move onto sorting 2nd class mail. We managed to start the 2nd class sort 4 days out every 5.
IF we finished the 2nd class sort we would move on to 'that big cage' where all the things with wrong addresses, non existent addresses, several addresses etc etc were piled up.
We managed to start looking through 'that big cage' once in the 6 months I was there.

Yup. Trying to chase a missing item I sold on here.

I don't send anything with them, based on my experience as a recipient.

They once mis-delivered something to me, and then whenever I tried (for days) to get them to collect and deliver it to the right person, they kept saying I needed to contact the sender (that I obviously had no details for, as it wasn't my package).

At least then I could actually contact them though, now I can't get anything out of them at all.

I sent a bike to my partner in Kenya a couple of months back with parcel force, it cost £320 If I remember correctly. That included insurance up to £1000, which cost about £40 (standard insurance was only £100)

I split it into 2 boxes, wheels in one, frame and fork in another. As someone else said, a standard bike box just exceeds their volumetric limits. Doing this saved me nearly £200.

Took 2 weeks to get there (They said 4 to 5 days) but I was fine with that as it was peak November Covid so not a lot of planes flying, It spent a week in a European freight terminal waiting for flights according to the tracking.

When it turned up Kenyan customs tried to charge her £500 import duty (half insured value) but she had the original receipt from 8 years ago so managed to haggle down to £30!

I bagged a lovely old school kuwahara BMX frame from the States for a great price. (poorly listed)

When it arrived here, PF tried to extract a load of duty and a handling charge out of me, even though the value was below the threshold for duty.

The guy in the states had made a mistake, re the value, when he filled out the shipping form. I took proof of it's actual value down to the depot (copy of the auction page and my PayPal info). Phoned head offce etc.

They just returned it to the seller while I was trying to sort the situation out. Never saw it or my money again.

Say its my own fault, if you like, but there was no way I was paying a load of duty/fees
(on top of the hefty shipping cost) when the value was below the (then) current threshold.

@Chest-Rockwell - it is the market value of the frame and not the amount you paid for it that will determine the duty, VAT etc. Again, it's common sense and stops people abusing the system by deliberately under-charging for export goods to game the system.

Not saying you did it deliberately but the rules are there for a reason.

I've posted 5 large, fragile, items using ParcelForce recently and they all arrived perfectly on time, intact and undamaged.

I ALWAYS use 24 - it's only a few ££ more and cuts in half the amount of time and number of stops the parcel makes. I also never post over a weekend.