FREIGHTQUOTE BEWARE - FREIGHTQUOTE DOES NOT PAY THIER DAMAGE CLAIMS Internet

First, I'm sorry this happened to you. It's a shame that your sales rep hasn't been able to help you more. Or maybe they tried, but your understanding of how things truly work is limited.

Unfortunately, as I've seen many times, this is just one more example of a customer that has not listened when a situation is explained to him, or isn't willing to cooperate with his responsibilities in substantiating a claim, and/or has not read the Terms and Conditions that are available online and at the time of setting up each shipment.

Freightquote.com (FQ) does not damage or lose freight, as they never touch it, and they aren't who is actually paying you for claims/disputes, but simply passing on whatever they're able to obtain back from the carrier. They are simply a third-party logistics company (3PL), or broker, helping to arrange freight movement at a discount. What they also do, as part of their totally free service, is to work to resolve claims with the freight carriers on behalf of their customers. FQ has to pay the carrier for the freight you book through the service. And then you pay them. FQ then has to try to get back from the carrier whatever portion of that payment is involved in a claim or dispute, then reimburse you. Sometimes, the carrier doesn't pay, so how can FQ be expected to pay you for the carrier's mistake, when FQ already paid them and didn't get anything reimbursed to them?

However, the customer is also responsible for packaging their items correctly, or even when they have and damage occurs anyway, they need to provide certain documentation to help FQ help them. FQ also provides this service for their customers because FQ is the freight carrier's customer, and you are FQ's customer. So of course the carrier is supposed to work with FQ directly, not you, but even they can't force the carrier to pay on a claim that isn't properly substantiated. Even then, some of them are just so big that they think they don't have to pay, whether dealing with FQ or with you directly. You actually have a much better chance of getting your claim resolved by FQ because of their immense buying power with that carrier. In some of those cases, if FQ can clearly see that the customer is not at fault, they may even give the customer a courtesy credit, out of FQ's own pocket. Or as your salesperson, his/her pocket, his/her commission.

As to Freightquote.com's responsibility in any freight getting damaged or lost, think of it this way: Let's say you bought a Delta Airlines ticket through a travel Web site like Orbitz. You then check your luggage, along with a loosely-packaged cardboard box of cookies. When you arrive, and you find that your box has been either totally lost, or broken open with nothing left but some crumbs, whose fault is that? Certainly not Orbitz, where you bought the ticket, as they only arranged for you to get a good, inexpensive seat on the plane. And although you wish that the baggage handlers hadn't mishandled your box, you didn't package the cookies in a suitable container for travel in the first place, and no one can guarantee perfect employees with perfect habits. Or at least, Orbitz can't guarantee that the airlines they work with will be able to. Anyway, you wouldn't run to Orbitz and demand that they pay you for your damaged or lost cookies. (This might be a bad example, as Orbitz probably wouldn't help at all with your cookie claim, whereas Freightquote does.)

As for using their site for price matching, then calling the carrier directly, it doesn't quite work that way, because once FQ has customized the site for you, you'll almost always get the best rates possible, better than carrier-direct, as most companies simply cannot get the kinds of discounts FQ can because of their shipping volume.

So please don't go publicly bashing a company that you think has done you wrong, when you might just not understand how things work. Please educate yourself on broker/carrier relations and regulations, or at least the terms and conditions of the company you are doing business with. The NMFTA.org is a great resource.