12 out of 14 boxes lost by DPD Local

[TM48]

Hello,

 

Thank you very much for this site. A long story short, we sent 14 boxes abroad and 12 of them were lost. They rejected our “claims” even before we actually made claims, because we were trying to ship prohibited items, which are “personal belongings”. The courier was DPD Local. I want to share my experience here. And I want to get this right for the next consumers like me.

 

 

 

I am a foreign national, who had lived in the U.K. for 3 years and moved to France in October 2021. My wife and I put our personal belongings into 14 boxes and dropped them in 2 batches at several drop points of DPD Local on 11^th of October. Several days later, all the boxes started going back to our old address in the U.K., where we did not live any more. We were told that one of tariff cords we declared for the custom control was incorrect.

 

One of the boxes has actually arrived at our old address on 19^th of October, and the new tenant received it. Later, my friend visited there and picked it up. The box was damaged and half opened. Another box has somehow arrived in France and did not move neither forward nor backward. The rest of the boxes were indicated as returning in the tracking system that we can access through their website. The status of the boxes stayed the same since then without giving us where exactly they are and when they were expected to return to us. When talking with the customer service of DPD Local, they always say that 1) “please just wait because the return journey usually takes 2 to 8 weeks”, and 2) “we will get back to you to tell where exactly the boxes are within 3 working days (which varied sometimes to the next 24 to 48 hours and sometimes to 1 week), because we need to raise an inquiry”. They have never come back to us.

 

On 5^th of December, we suddenly received email from DPD Local saying that “we (DPD Local) could not approve your claim”. Although it sounded as if we had claimed for boxes lost, we had not made any claims at that time because we still believed that our boxes were on their return journey as they explained. According to them, the reason for the rejection was because we tried to send prohibited items, which were “personal items” and “personal belongings”. These two are actually in their long list of prohibited items, which they showed us through a link they shared by the email.

 

After the email, we started a bit of research and found that DPD Local and DPD are different companies and DPD seemed to be actually handling the parcel. Therefore, I called a local depot of DPD and talked with a lady on the phone. She looked for one of our boxes in their system as a trial and found it in their lost property area. She declined to help us further on the phone as it was beyond her responsibility and suggested to talk to the “platinum team”, giving us their email address.

 

On 16^th of December, we sent a request by email to look for our boxes retained in the lost property and send them back to us. It was followed by a series of painstaking email exchanges making the same explanations, answering to the same questions and receiving incomplete answers with different people in the same and in different teams. Now, after three months, what we learnt were;

• All our boxes have turned back to our old address in the U.K. because of an “IT issue” with DPD, not by an incorrect tariff code.
• All the boxes seemed to have arrived at the lost property area of their hub in Birmingham around late October to early November time.
• DPD is reluctant to look for our boxes in the lost property area because they usually hold properties lost only for 6 weeks and then dispose if a claim was not made.

We had a small hope because initially we were told that the lost property holds things for about 6 months, not 6 weeks. But now we need to move on.

 

We want to get this right. I was looking for information how to make a court claim and accidentally found this site. Therefore, I am sharing my story here. And, at the same time, I would like to have advices for me to make the best course of action. I have to admit that I have not gone through all relevant threads yet, as English is not my first language and terms and expressions in the posts are very specialistic and not easy for me to understand.

 

Now, I understand that I have to make a claim to DPD formally in any way. Could you advise if there are things that I have to know before making a claim please? My concern is the “personal items” and “personal belongings” in their prohibited items list. We did check the list when making our parcel. But, because the list was long and contained a lot of irrelevant things, we did not go through the list top to bottom line by line. Instead, we looked for suspicious items in the list, such as aerosols, liquids and knives, and excluded such items from our parcel. On the other hand, we put the same name as the sender and the recipient on the consignments openly declaring that the contents are our personal belongings for the custom declaration purpose. And they accepted it. Another concern is that DPD is now saying that they cannot make a claim for us because 21 days of their claim period is already over. I do not know if they want to say that they do not accept our claim if we made it because of the same reason. We did not make claim because they were saying the boxes were on their return journey or were in the lost property area. We have records of chats with DPD Local customer service and all the email with DPD customer service.

 

By the way, the box retained in France was eventually returned to us. We talked to Chronopost, which is their French partner, as DPD Local suggested. Chronopost required “handling fee” to take it out from the French custom to let it continue its forward journey, and we paid for it. Then they started saying that they could not find the box. But, after we started talking DPD directly in December, the box finally started moving but in backwards unfortunately. During Christmas, it was delivered to a DPD Local shop near by our old address in the U.K and my friend pick it up later.

 

Thank you in advance.

[BankFodder]

As you already understand, you should read up a reasonable number of the stories on this sub- forum. Most of them involve EVRi – but it will still give you an idea of what you will have to do to get reimbursement.
You will need a UK address for service of documents and also if it goes to hearing and there happens to be an in-person hearing, you will have to be in the UK to attend the hearing. If it is a virtual hearing then you will be able to attend anywhere in the world.

You keep on saying personal items – but do you have a list of them?
What do you actually declare when you organise the carriage of these items.
What value did you declare?
Did you take out any insurance in respect of these items?

It's interesting here that they say that they had the items and they knew where they had gone to – to some lost property area in Birmingham. I'm trying to understand your story which is a bit long. Did you try to obtain the items while they were in that lost property area?
Do you believe that they have now been disposed of?
If they have been disposed of – what does this mean? Does it mean that they have been destroyed or sold on or what?


 

[TM48]

Thank you very much for your response. 

 

Quote

You keep on saying personal items – but do you have a list of them?
What do you actually declare when you organise the carriage of these items.
What value did you declare?
Did you take out any insurance in respect of these items?

I do not have a complete list of items. It was a moving. We dumped things in drawers and cabinets into cardboard boxes. Then we made the custom declarations later on using the function provided by their website following their instructions. Therefore, our list is abstract and not complete. As an example; Description of goods: Dress shirts, Tariff code: 62179000, Country of Manufacture: United Kingdom, Unit Value: 1.5, Qty: 10, Total Weight (KG): 4.3, Total Value: 15.00. We had jumpers and trousers but did not list because there are fewer comparing to the shirts. Regarding the value, we put much lower value than the price we actually paid for because they were not brand-new. We opted out the insurance offered by DPD Local. 

 

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Did you try to obtain the items while they were in that lost property area?

Yes we did. Since the boxes started going backwards to our old address, DPD Local had been explaining that the boxes were on their return journey. Therefore, we had been requesting to give us updates of their locations and estimated arrival. In December, DPD told us that some of our boxes had been received by the lost property area. Since then, we were requesting DPD to look for all the boxes in the area and send them back to us. We could have asked DPD to return our boxes retained in their lost property area right after they arrived there, if DPD or DPD Local gave us correct information. But at that time, we were being told to just wait because the boxes were on their return journey. 

 

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Do you believe that they have now been disposed of?

I do not want to but, yes, I think so. A "CS Advisor" of DPD said to us in his email; "None of the below parcels are in lost property. They are stored for a short period of time and if not claimed, they are disposed of."

 

Quote

If they have been disposed of – what does this mean? Does it mean that they have been destroyed or sold on or what?

I do not know. They just say they dispose.  

 

Thank you. 

 

 

[BankFodder]

Please will you stand by for a fuller reply later on today, but in the meantime could you please start spacing your posts properly so that they are easier to read .

 

Particularly people using small screens such as telephones find it very difficult to follow a solid block of text

 

[TM48]

Excuse me. I will try to make smaller paragraphs, giving one line between two. 

 

And thank you for your help. 

[BankFodder]

It's going to be very unhelpful that you didn't keep a list of the items that you put in the parcels.

However, far more concerning is the fact that you have apparently declared the value as being £15 - or maybe it was €15. Can you please clarify the value that you declared to the courier

[TM48]

The batch 1, which consists of 9 boxes, was declared as total GBP310.00. 

 

The batch 2, which consists of 5 boxes, was declared as total GBP160.00. 

 

 

[BankFodder]

That is the maximum that you will be able to claim after you have made deductions for the items which have arrived.

So what is the value of the items which have arrived and what is your net loss?

[TM48]

Values of the two boxes returned are GBP40 and GBP30. Therefore, the total loss is calculated as GBP400 based on our declarations. 

 

Just disappointing. 

[BankFodder]

I expect that we can help you get your money back, but I'm afraid that if you under-valued the items then that is a risk that you decided to take .

I don't really understand why you declared a lesser value.

What was the advantage to you of doing this?

 

 

[TM48]

Quote

I don't really understand why you declared a lesser value.

What was the advantage to you of doing this?

It was their instruction. For example, the shirts were not bland-new. Although I bought one from a shop for GBP50 in the past, no one will buy it from me for GBP50 now because I wore it. Also I thought it was not a good idea to declare a high value for the custom declaration, because it can attract unnecessary attention at the customs.

 

To be honest, I thought that the courier would damage boxes and/or items in the boxes but never thought that it could loss boxes. 

 

Things we lost were used and old. That's why we are attached to them. Also there are things that we added values after we bought, such as information accumulated in note books. This kind of subjective values are difficult to translate into monetary values.

 

The lesson here is that we should have list up all the items in the box and have given monetary values in case a courier losses items, because it can. 

[TM48]

On 05/04/2022 at 21:52, BankFodder said:

I expect that we can help you get your money back, but I'm afraid that if you under-valued the items then that is a risk that you decided to take .

Sorry I didn't reply to this. I would like to try my travel insurance first. As we are covered by the insurance as an employee benefits, we may be able to talk to the insurance company as the boxes lost were unaccompanied items of our trip from the U.K. to France. 

[BankFodder]

Ok. Please keep us updated .

We can help you if you want or if you needWe can help you if you want or if you need

 

[TM48]

Thank you very much.