Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Forum Do all national piano movers have bad reviews?

Yeah, it's just a shame that we won't ever hear the end of the story.

Hi Amy. PM me and I will give you the contact of an amazing piano mover from California. He just transported my recently bought piano from Arizona to Texas and it was great. I found him after having a horrible experience with a moving company I found on the internet.

We just finished another perfect cross-country move with Walter. Their rates are rising, for some reason, compared to our last move in 2018. They do use local (or regional) companies for the last mile and they will not tell you who they use in advance, but they seem to use qualified piano movers. The guys on the pickup end here exclusively move pianos and the lead guy had a lot of experience. They actually drove 4 hours from another city for this delivery. I interviewed him briefly before we started the job to ensure he knew what he was doing before lifting a 9-footer. The guys on the other end managed to get the instrument up 8 steps without killing themselves or damaging the piano or house.

We are going to do another big move with them in a few months. I will perhaps contact the local movers they used on the last move and see if I can hired them directly to get the piano moved to the Walter warehouse on each end and save some money.

How far are you going for the next move? If the folks you like will drive 4 hours for one end, maybe they'll go farther for the whole job. Option B to save money might be to hire the local folks yourself on each end, and two the piano yourself. Now that I re-read your post, maybe that's what you meant anyway...

No, moving across the continent so don't expect local movers to deliver several thousand miles away. Doesn't hurt to ask, I suppose.

Walter Transport are basically a brokerage, using their site in Indiana as a distribution point. They have identified skilled and reliable piano movers all over the country. They moved my piano from Rockville, MD, to Santa Rosa, CA in 2016. The movers at both ends were very good and my piano arrived in my new home in the same condition it left my previous home. This summer, Walter again moved my piano from Santa Rosa, to Tucson AZ. It was transported to Phoenix, where a local mover brought it the last 100 miles to Tucson. Again, satisfied with the move. Life is full of risks, most bigger than moving one's piano!

I can tell you that the insurance rates for those of use that do moving have gone through the roof. I have been with my company for years and they raised my rate so much that I had to raise our moving price. And the stinker in that is that we have never had a claim.

However I see pianos that have been horribly damaged by movers all the time when they come into town on a commercial mover. They also lose hardware and case parts to an alarming degree. When a customer calls me and tells me that the mover lost the hinges, I know they didn't know what they were doing.