Damage on delivery: ten days, and a wording that does not protect

It is the one stage of a move where your rights vanish in a few days, and it lasts twenty minutes. Everything well prepared upstream, the inventory, the declaration of value, the choice of carrier, is worth nothing if those twenty minutes are badly used.

The gesture: check, then write

At delivery, two things happen at once. You check the packages against the inventory, number by number, to spot what is missing. And you look at the outside condition of each, to spot what has suffered.

Packages bearing a mark of impact are opened in front of the driver. Not all of them: those ones. It is a triage, not a general unpacking, which would be materially impossible on a container.

What you find is written on the delivery document, before signing. That document, and it alone, opens a claim.

Why a general reservation is worthless

The most used wording is also the least effective. A general reservation on unpacking names nothing, records nothing, and has been held insufficient: it amounts to signing with no reservation at all.

A reservation counts by its precision. It names the package, the item and the damage: “box 14 crushed on one corner, six plates broken”, “wardrobe lot 3, side panel split over thirty centimetres”. A photograph taken at the same moment usefully completes it, but does not replace the handwritten mention.

That is the difference between a claim that settles and one that bogs down: the carrier does not dispute what was observed in their presence.

The ten days, and what they close

Article L133-3 of the Commercial Code requires reservations to be confirmed by registered letter within ten days of delivery, Sundays and public holidays excluded. After that, the right to compensation lapses, even on obvious damage and even if the carrier acknowledged it orally.

That period is neither indicative nor negotiable. It does not reopen for good faith, a chaotic move or the consignee’s absence. This is why you need it in mind before the truck arrives, not discover it while wondering what to do.

The letter repeats the reservations recorded on the delivery document, adds damage found while unpacking in the meantime, and encloses the photographs. It goes out within the ten days, not on the eleventh.

The case of packing you did yourself

It changes things and deserves repeating here: an item you packed yourself is almost never covered, the carrier not answering for packing they did not do.

This is not an unfair clause, it is a logical consequence, and it is decided at quote time, item by item, not on the day of the breakage.

What the inventory does here

It comes back, and this is its second use. Checking is only possible against a list, and a claim is only quantified on a value written in advance. That is why the valued inventory of the customs file must be honest: undervalued, it weakens precisely this remedy.

One last, more prosaic point. Plan to be two at delivery: one person checking, one looking at the packages. Alone, you do both badly, and that is exactly the moment when there is no catching up.