5/5
I worked with City Cremation after my infant son died at UCSF. We already had a church for his memorial service and we are planning to plant a tree with his ashes, so we were looking for a company that offered simple, no-frills direct cremation with a minimum of fuss. City Cremation made things very simple with everything done by email and fax. They were very responsive and professional. Arranging the cremation of a loved one is a very difficult thing to go through, and I really appreciate how easy they made it – I would recommend them to anyone who needs to arrange a cremation and doesn’t need extra services like a place to hold a memorial service, a place to intern ashes, a fancy urn for display, etc.
Nathan B.
5/5
Simple, efficient, online service. No problems whatsoever. If you know what you want and don’t require much hand-holding to get through what is inevitably a painful aftermath of a death (and prefer to spend your money on loved ones while they are alive) this is the place.
Lorena B.
5/5
I’ve never written a review for yelp (long lime lurker, first time poster), but after reading Alexandra’s review of City Cremation, I felt compelled to speak up. When my uncle passed away last year, my sister and I used City Cremation to make cremation arrangements. Thank god I didn’t look at yelp before choosing City Cremation because I probably would have ended up going somewhere else and wasting a ton of money on a bunch of stuff I didn’t need. Reading Alexandra’s post, I can kind of understand her problems with the way things or done at City Cremation. I mean, I’m sure everyone reacts differently to a death in the family. From what I can tell, it seems like Alexandra needed some human contact and hand holding to get through making these kinds of arrangements, which is totally valid, but City Cremation is not that kind of funeral home and from what I can tell they make this very clear on their website. I for one was happy that I didn’t have to go into some office and have a long conversation with whoever about my uncle’s cremation. With City Cremation, all my sister and I had to do was enter information on their website and fax them some paperwork and a few weeks later, the ashes were mailed to me. It was totally painless and easy. As far as communication is concerned, I didn’t have any problems. They answered all of my emails promptly. I never tried to call them on the phone because they are an online only company. If you need to talk to someone on the phone or in person, I guess you probably shouldn’t use City Cremation. Again, I think it’s pretty clear from their website that they are an email only operation. If they had to hire someone to answer phone calls, I’m sure they wouldn’t be able to keep their price so low. Oh yeah, and their price is LOW. The main reason I chose City cremation is that their price was LESS THAN HALF the cost of every other place I looked at online (I paid less than $800). I for one think it’s criminal what some of these funeral places are charging! I mean, it’s great that some people can afford to spend $2000 (this is the estimate Neptune Society quoted me over the phone) on cremation because they want somebody to talk to them, but not everybody wants to pay extra for that. As I mentioned before, I found it preferable NOT to have to talk to somebody in person and I guess it was an added bonus that I saved over $1000. I’m sorry that the last poster had a bad experience with City Cremation, but it sounds like most of the reason her experience was so bad is because she was expecting a service from them that they clearly don’t provide. It’s kind of like going to a steak house and being upset that they don’t have anything vegan. City Cremation offers a great service for people that just want a simple cremation and don’t want to mortgage their house to pay for it.
