This means I'm driving a rental car for 100+ days a year.
I've tried all the major rental brands and Hertz is a terrible experience even when they're not calling the police on you by mistake. Their systems don't work quite right, there's a bunch of hidden fees, and their customer service is lacking at best.
I swear by Enterprise and purchasing the extra insurance to cover any damages. They've done right by me as a customer across many different cities and locations.
I know that some people are always going to just buy whatever is the cheapest or whatever deal gets them the most points with credit card or whatever. And that seems to be where Hertz makes their money.
But for anyone willing to pay a little more for a good experience and less stress Enterprise is my recommendation.
I've had a good experience because they just don't seem to care. That is, the employees working there just check in/out, sign the paperwork, that's it. I haven't had to spend a lot of time turning down questionable options and upgrades. There haven't been turn-in inspections where they claim that tiny scratch on the car with 160k miles is my fault.
They just seem to get me checked in so they can get back to their phone. It's not a premium experience by any means, but it's simple.
In life, i've learned, that if an optional extra price isn't listed for that option, don't select it. and if you really need that option and the price isn't there, just hit the back button and don't use that service ever again.
Last trip Enterprise was fully booked so I did try Budget. Their office is so small that you actually have to arrive at our local airport and THEN call the attendant who comes in from her house to book out your car. That took almost an hour.
The return process is even sillier. Write your mileage on a poorly photocopied slip of paper, and drop it on her desk with the keys. No pics. No checkout inspection, just 'trust us not to charge you extra'.
Fortunately I took a ton of pictures including the odometer so when they couldnt do math and tried to charge me an extra 1000 km, I fought back with pics and got those charges dropped. That's the last time I use Budget.
Don't most credit cards provide rental insurance? How is their coverage different (if it is)?
However I was in one a few months ago and got a puncture on a dual carriageway. By the time I pulled over to a safe location the tyre was shredded. No problem, go into the boot to get the spare wheel out and I'll deal with it later.
There was no spare wheel. Just some little device which I assume is supposed to somehow re-inflate the tyre and seal any small holes for a small amount of time. Clearly not going to work when the side wall is shredded from driving the best part of a mile on it.
Too 6 hours for a tow-truck to arrive, pick me up, take me to a local garage, and change the tyre. That cost my employer far more than the cost of a spare wheel -- not to mention the cost of the tow itself being about the same price as the wheel + tyre.
Probably not a slight on Enterprise, as I'm sure it's the same with other hire companies (I hired from Sixt on holiday and it was the same). Why don't cars come with spare wheels any more? Are people really that incompetent they can't change one? Surely punctures as as common now as they were 20 years ago.
I suspect they don't want people stealing/replacing spares in rentals with worn ones[0]. The mere possibility of this adds 1 more thing that has to be inspected and kept track of.
0. I once managed to run down the battery on a U-Haul by keeping the emergency blinkers on(!). I didn't have jumper cables and thought I'd hot-swap it with the one on my car to get it charged: which is how I discovered that batteries in U-Hauls cannot be easily removed. I ended up getting a tow truck to jump-start the U-Haul many hours later.
Not sure if I'm strictly a victim of effective marketing, or if they flipped places in the last however many years, or what, but it's interesting to see your post and the replies that imply I've got it backwards.
They were sold the private equity then taken public in 2006 and the quality of the company declined dramatically over the 2010s.
They changed their model to focus on partnership programs through airlines, hotels, and credit cards while offering low teaser rates for their rentals and upselling addons afterwards.
Performance metrics for their staff shifted from customer satisfaction to sales targets.
They canceled their R&D efforts (like rental kiosks) and refocused that money on marketing campaigns.
Their marketshare and profits declined and as a result activist investor Carl Icahn put pressure on the company to cut costs in 2016, forcing in a new CEO. Those cuts ultimately led to incidents like the one in the original article about falsely reporting the vehicles stolen but also to the company's bankruptcy filing in 2019.
It's been quite the fall from grace for the company.
Filing a false police report is a crime, it would be nice to see that enforced against the company in one way or another.
"Someone told me to do it" is not an excuse for criminal behaviour, and neither is "We constructed a bureaucracy that results in us engaging in criminal behaviour".
No one important at Wells-Fargo went to jail either - they set policies which were expected to have certain outcomes, but top brass could not have possibly have foreseen the outcomes. I'm sick of plausible deniability, especially when it isn't even plausible any longer, the complaints go back years.
Those customers should obviously get their judgment money, and Hertz should pay a heavy price (maybe even such a heavy price that they go bankrupt), but no one should go to jail for filing a false police report unless they intended to mislead the police.
When I called customer support to deal with the issue, they hung up on me three times. (Typical conversation:
- Sit on hold for 15-45 minutes
- Hello, can I have your rental number?
- 12345-XYZ
- <click>
I told the fourth person I'd be issuing a chargeback and dumping the vehicle in front of the locked gate of their parking lot if they also hung up. They directed us to a location that couldn't accept the vehicle.
We ended up paying for one day rental or something, but at least I didn't go to jail.
As other commenters said, multiple people (probably management, execs) at Hertz should be serving time in federal prison.
I finally got it towed because I said I'd just be forced to abandon it.
In its release, Hertz says they believe “a meaningful portion of the settlement” will be covered by insurance so ‘no big deal’ to them what they did to customers, at least for investors. Meanwhile their CEO shrugs in an included statement saying they “will not always be perfect.”
No way that the insurance company would cover negliance and fraud...
https://atlantablackstar.com/2022/12/04/hertz-false-stolen-c...
California law does not have any sort of "prior use" exception to theft laws. Letting someone use a car in the past does not give them cart blanche to borrow it again without permission in the future.
You ex stole your car. If they police did not do anything, the proper response would be to take your complaint of inaction to Internal Affairs or your local elected representative. And then to take the car back yourself, or to hire a PI to retrieve the car or a lawyer to issue a demand letter for the return of the car.
edit: and if people aren't punished at Hertz, those other car rental companies will see that the money to be made through bad behavior more than makes up for the costs if caught.
It should be a legal requirement that a human review and sign off on any complaint about a stolen car to police. That personal (and company) should be held criminally liable for making false police reports in addition to any civil damages (including significant punitive damages) they should pay.
$1000 insulin only exists because the government has been bought and paid for to create a legal monopoly. This is state violence against people who need life-saving medication.
>Ahead of this, Ma addressed an assembly of high-profile figures with a controversial speech that criticised the Chinese financial system. He was not seen in public again until late January. In the interim, there were rumours that he might have been placed under house arrest or otherwise detained. Some even questioned if he was still alive.
Obviously there are aspects of China you don't want to emulate (eg the ethnic cleansing).
Someone needs to go to jail.
If a cashier at a fast food restaurant takes $30 from the register, they go to jail. If a company steals millions from their workers paychecks, we slap them with a tiny fine.
So as per example your example the guy who filed the report be sent to jail even though he was following company policy, though in this case made a mistake. How it compares to cash register guy who was clearly stealing.
You fuck up someone's life bad enough and often enough, you just don't get to be a company anymore.
Ok this is horrific, and Hertz should be ashamed of their behavior. Now, we dont have any proof the arrest or jail time caused the miscarriage, but to the extent we believe it did, can we also talk for a minute about why our executive branch/jail system is so hard on people (of both sexes btw) such that physiological distress occurs such as miscarriages or suicides?
It's completely unnecessary, I'd dare say detrimental, to getting rehabilitated.
Some people, whether they notice or not, prefer a world where "others" suffer.
I did notice this aspect of American mentality. Somehow the culture here really seems to feel that retributive justice is justice served.
On the other hand, I am terrified to travel there fearing something like this will happen and I will rot in jail for some Kafkaesque mistake.
I travel a LOT, and there are very few businesses in that industry I hate, Hertz is one of them. My only times using Hertz have all ended in disaster.
while this is indeed 364 too many, this number is still absolutely tiny. there is going to be lots of confirmation bias in this thread -- of bad interactions. whereas the very very large majority of customers are probably happy with hertz. i always have been.
don't get me wrong, someone at hertz should go to jail for this. but your chances of being one of those 364 seems absolutely tiny doesn't it? they must do a billion rentals a year.
Says a lot about law enforcement practices when being wrongly accused by them is considered so terrible, that compensation is 10 years of average income in the country.
