Licensing and Insurance, Checked Properly Not Assumed
Every other factor on this list matters less if this one is missing, because licensing and insurance are what give you any real recourse when something goes wrong. A company without a valid trade licence isn't just cutting corners on paperwork. It's operating with essentially no accountability, and that's exactly the situation you don't want to discover halfway through a move.
Checking this properly takes about two minutes and almost nobody actually does it. Dubai's trade licence search portal lets you confirm a company's legal name and licence status directly, and that name should match exactly what appears on your quotation and invoice. If a company quotes under one name but wants payment sent to a different one, that mismatch alone is worth asking hard questions about before you book anything.
Insurance works the same way. Ask specifically what goods in transit coverage includes, what the claim process actually looks like, and whether there's a cap on payout per item. A company that answers this clearly and immediately has clearly been asked before and has nothing to hide. One that gets vague or defensive is telling you something too.
Worth noting too that licensing isn't just a formality that protects you in a worst case scenario. A properly licensed company also tends to have proper employment arrangements for its staff, which in practice means better trained movers, lower turnover, and a crew that actually knows what they're doing rather than day labour picked up that morning. The paperwork and the quality of the actual move are more connected than people assume.
This connection between licensing and crew quality isn't a coincidence either. Companies that invest properly in their legal setup tend to invest similarly in training, equipment and retaining staff long enough for them to actually get good at the job, rather than treating moving labour as a revolving door of temporary hires.
