Ethical Booking Policy

Ethical Booking policy (We’ve got one so we need to shout about it)

I was sitting on a plane at Alicante Airport last summer and next to me was a nice chap I was chatting to. It transpired that he was booked on a flight 2 days earlier but was offloaded at the check-in desk with 2 other men because the flight was overbooked, even though he had paid for his flight well in advance. I was amazed that this could happen. I’d heard of it in the past but thought, being in the age of customer service and social media, that practice had long gone.

There was another example of this. When I was on route to Derby for my daughters graduation ceremony, I was called by the manager of a national hotel chain (beginning with T!) saying that my booking from 3 months ago had been cancelled and there was no room for us. You can imagine the colourful language that followed especially since it was paid in full. Rooms in Derby that weekend were as rare as rocking horses and it was snowing very hard. The hotel was overbooked so they decided to let go of the older (cheaper) bookings to free up space for other people like me who were now desperate to get a room and were prepared to pay a premium.

These companies don’t have an ethical booking policy and I’m sure that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I know for myself in the Removals industry that this is also common practice; when it’s busy, we get calls quite regularly from people who thought their removal was booked but were dropped at the last minute with no explanation, and are now desperately ringing round to find someone to move them on their now very busy, fixed day. Imagine how stressed and angry that would make you!

I’m not saying we have the only ethical booking policy but I am saying that it is very hard to spot a company that does from one that doesn’t. In many cases picking a regulated remover would be enough, but there are supposedly well-respected regulated removers in the area whose name regularly appears when we ask people who let them down. The ironic thing is that we can often help them because of our ethical booking procedure.

Here’s how our Ethical booking policy works:

We will take your enquiry, arrange a free no obligation survey of your property, and then we’ll send you an accurate fixed price for a professional service tailor made to your specific needs. If you are happy to proceed, we’ll work closely with you on a regular basis to establish a realistic provisional removal date and, once agreed, put you on our system. All calls and meetings are date and time stamped and logged into our contact history system so the chance of an error occurring is negligible. Once your provisional date is on our system, we’ll confirm it with you and will hold it for you up to 7 days from the actual removal date, at which point we will need a firm confirmation. All the time you are provisionally booked we will ensure that we have a specific crew and vehicle/s held for you. We’ll turn all work away that may clash with your moving day, even if it is confirmed and of higher value. Not only will we hold resources for our provisional bookings, we also never sub out work to other companies or use agency staff. In doing so, we can guarantee that you will receive a quality service.



If it transpires that the date you have provisionally booked becomes increasingly popular, we’ll contact you just to confirm it’s still on track and, if so, will reject any other work, whatever the cost to us. Once we get to 7 days from the date, we’ll need the date confirming and paying for. Upon payment and confirmation, we’ll send you a Confirmation of Removal Day letter and receipt of payment; you can then relax!

When you get to the point where you need to confirm and pay and you have yet to exchange contracts, this may be a problem as you don’t want to pay for the move if the date changes. It is for this reason that we have come up with the Late Exchange Guarantee which will hold your provisional booking for an agreed period of time (usually 24 hrs) without having to pay in full. We charge a small fee for this, but it’s a small price to pay if you’re in that awkward situation. We are the only company that offers this service.

Part of our drive towards achieving a quality customer experience is the directly employed and trained staff who are motivated and will treat all our customers with great care and consideration. They will go the extra mile to make sure you’re happy (please see our testimonials page). We also send more loading space than is needed to enable a faster and safer load up.

We regularly turn work away for provisionally booked days and quite often lose out when people’s dates change. The gap that appears in our schedule often gets filled by clients that have been let down at the last minute by companies that don’t operate an ethical booking policy – isn’t that ironic? When our customers put their faith in us, we don’t abuse that trust.

I can’t remember the number of times I’ve heard clients that we have helped at the last minute saying that they wished they had booked us to start with. Isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing?

Do it right the first time: book A J Stephenson Removals Ltd today! We will NOT let you down.