Heritage Exposition Services, Inc. HES with unethical business practice - authorized charges, rude responses St. Louis, Missouri

Heritage Expo Services (HES) is a local show decorated contracted to handle drayage, setup and teardown of the Annual Halloween & Attractions Expo. Over two dozen vendors, myself included have found that HES exercises unfair and dishonest business practices regarding their shipping and handling procedures including, but not limited to, unauthorized handling of our cargo to incur billable services, refusing the pickup of our cargo by our authorized third party logistics companies, falsifying cargo weight to increase billable shipping and handling charges, and billing customers beyond the reasonable industry standards for similar services provided by other companies. We are disgusted by annual invoices laced with surprise charges that we receive from HES after each show.

On my personal account, here's what happened:
I have a designated freight forwarding company (GlobalTranz) to ship my exhibit materials (400lbs) from Los Angeles to St. Louis. This cost approx $600. After the show on Sunday March 11, I had immediately packed up and readied my materials (by 5PM) to ship back to Los Angeles and contacted GlobalTranz to make the pick up.

When GlobalTranz was ready to pick up my crate, HES had told them there was no crate of mine to be picked up and sent them on their way. HES, instead, took matters in their own hands and shipped my materials back to Los Angeles using their OWN services and charged me over $1800! When asked why they forced my freight to use their service they told me my company didn't come to the show on time to pick up my materials by the Monday 10AM cutoff. This is clearly a lie because GlobalTranz services several other vendors at the show and they had trucks DOCKED at the America Center the entire weekend of the show, so they could not POSSIBLY have been late... besides, my materials were ready the night before the pick up deadline and GlobalTranz supposedly was looking for my freight but HES told them it wasn't there.


There is clear financial gain to force a vendor's freight because the vendor's money is at the mercy of HES, they can charge any arbitrary amount.

This is not an isolated incident as I have correspondence over email with 2 dozen vendors that have similar or worse issues with HES. At the moment, we are individually making disputes with HES but they don't care about us once they have our money... therefore we are looking for public outlets to get them investigated about their business practice. There is also inequity of treatment from this decorator as some vendors who have "greased the wheels" of the right people can get their way and service for next to nothing. We also have vendors who ship their materials from thousands of miles away, only to be charged MORE by HES to simply move their materials several hundred feet from the docks to the show floor.

We're also appealing to the company Transworld, who produces the show, to get out of the contract with HES for future years.