Forward Air

Chose them to ship with them internationally — they did not pack the item sufficiently. The item arrived wrapped up but was told at pick up point that the item had to be signed for before it could be opened. Signed for the item and took it home for unpacking. Took video of the unpacking process and the item was severely damaged. We made a claim with the shipper and only got $ 250 for a $ 700+ valued item despite the damage and video/​picture evidence sent to them for the claim (not to mention it took almost a year to get the claim from them).
Horrible experience — DO NOT recommend using them if you value whatever you are shipping.

I have never written a one star review, so I am making this review very detailed to explain why such a negative review, and warn others what to look out for to avoid our experience. I am not saying no one should use Forward Air, but that you need to know HOW to use it to get the most out of it, and avoid our experience. For families just looking to move their college student to an apartment, there are BIG things to look out for:
I realize that Forward Air is used mostly by businesses, not private individuals, and I am assuming it works well for them. But I found that many of my questions were answered incorrectly or misleadingly when I called to find out details.
First of all, the weight of the pallets is always included in the total weight, and you can not ask to have it subtracted, though I was told you could.
Second, we have to stretch wrap the items to the pallets ourselves; it is not done by their workers.
Third, the pallets are not all 48×48 inches, and that makes a BIG difference. Some of our pallets were as small as 36×36, and that meant that we couldn’t load much on. It turns out to be a HUGE mistake to load a tall, skinny item on a pallet, so it is not full to the edges. This is because F.A. has a formula for volume, which goes from the top of the tallest item to the full width and length of the pallet. Therefore, when a pallet is not filled as compactly as possible into a cube right up to the edges of the pallet, all that dead air gets counted into the final volume, at huge cost.
Had we been advised of this, we would have loaded the pallets completely differently: We would have requested only pallets that were the full 48×48, rejected the smaller ones, packed up to the edge everywhere, and stacked every pallet that had anything tall on it, right up to the height of the tallest item. That would have meant that we used far fewer pallets — perhaps half as many.
The weight would then have exceeded the volume calculation, and that would have cut our cost from $ 2430 to $ 1460, which is what we expected to pay!
Although the executive who helped us do the stretch wrap, Michelle, was pleasant and lovely, she never explained explained to us what we were doing wrong in our loading, and how that was going to cost us a huge amount of money! She did help us protect our more vulnerable items with cardboard, so we could qualify for insurance, but frankly, I would rather have forgone the insurance, and risked that the multiple layers of bubble wrap on items poking up inside the pallet would have been
sufficient. Or if she had advised us to stack regular boxes around them to a height above the little bits sticking up, it would have accomplished the same thing, made us insurance-​worthy, AND saved us the extra $ 1000 by allowing the weight rather than volume measurement to be used.
I deeply resent that extra $ 1000, which should have been a preventable expense.