Stalok: fast to bill, slow to deliver and arrogant

This occurred in Piriapolis, Uruguay, December 2015.

Saturday December 5, 2015. Stop at Piriapolis. We need urgently a swageless connector to repair a broken lower stay.


Monday December 7. email and direct call to Stalok from our company in France. We ask them to send the goods urgently, payment follows ASAP (our company is already a Stalok customer). Stalok sends a pro forma bill the same day.


Tuesday December 8: payment. Transfer done directly from our bank, proof of payment sent to stalok, follow up by phone.


... And nothing comes. Many phone calls, pure promises and pretexts. In fact Stalok was not waiting for payment: they were waiting for payment to be effective (which may take several days).


Friday December 11. The goods are finally sent, 4 days late. These 4 days made the difference. We arrived at Puerto Williams on January 5, 4 days after on our latest possible ETA (Dec 31 to January 1; some people were waiting for us).


To worsen things, the delivery was postponed 1 day by DHL, without any follow up or information from Stalok. We did not even have a parcel tracking number.


According to their last e mail (Dec. 11): "Please find attached your order acknowledgement which details our expected delivery date. Although the vast majority of our orders are delivered on time we will contact you if there is any change". LIES.



What Stalok Marine Sales Manager writes. We were upset about their behavior, their false claims (on their web site, they claim to be responsive!) and we wrote them so. Read here.

We received this answer from the Marine Sales Manager. Read here. In short, we are rude and it is all our fault: lack of planning, wrong mode of payment, wrong courier company, and incapacity to grasp basic facts.

Wow, this guy knows how to deal with customers! Nonetheless, here are some basic facts:


- 4 undue days to send the goods = 4 days late on arrival;
- planning of the trip based on experience of the former trip;
- more than 1000 hours of preparation;
- good reasons to pay by bank transfer instead of credit card;
- good reasons to use DHL instead of Fedex as suggested by Stalok
- problem with a former Stalok delivery by Fedex. Read here.

There are plenty of trustful providers that really care about urgent demands and don't lie to you. Stalok is not one of them.