Somehow, Hertz continues to be an ongoing concern, in both senses of the word. The company that made itself infamous by repeatedly trying to get innocent renters arrested for car theft tried to put all of that behind it with a $168 million class-action lawsuit settlement in 2022.
The company then pledged to do better going forward. It didn’t say how it was going to do this, since it apparently wasn’t going to address underlying issues, like branches’ willingness to outsource vehicle retrieval to law enforcement and the extremely sloppy inventory control procedures that led to employees filing theft reports for vehicles that were parked in their parking lots.
Since then, Hertz has found new ways to be awful, like charging Tesla renters fees to refill their returned rentals with gasoline. Then there’s this incident, first reported by travel site One Mile at a Time, which details the ridiculous interaction one renter had with the company when a Hertz rep tried to charge him $10,000 for driving “too many” miles with his Unlimited Miles rental.
Long story short, it would appear that someone rented a Hertz car for a month, and the rental allowed unlimited miles. The man drove 25,000 miles on the car over the course of that month, and the agency wasn’t happy about it.
Given the number of miles driven, the Hertz representative stated that he would charge the man’s credit card an extra $10,000. As the interaction goes:
Hertz representative: “You need to leave, sir.”
Customer: “But you’re going to charge this to $10,000 to my credit?”
Hertz representative: “Yes.”
Customer: “When this literally, that’s not even allowed. I never signed…”
Hertz representative: “You show me where it says I can’t charge it.”
Customer: “Right here, it literally says I won’t get charged anything, it says miles allowed, free miles, it literally says to refer to this if there’s anything extra. I’ve never signed anything saying I can only go 100 miles a day, or anything like that, or that I would have to pay more.”
Hertz representative: “But you also never signed anything saying you were going to be allowed to drive 25,000 miles in a month.”
Customer: “No, unlimited is 100,000 miles.”
Hertz representative: “No it is not.”
While 25,000 miles seems like a literally impossible number of miles to drive in 30 days, nothing in the contract stated the “unlimited miles” the customer was entitled to was actually limited in any way.
What made this worse is that the Hertz rep told the man he was going to ding his credit card for $10,000. Then he told him to leave. Understandably, the renter didn’t leave, because doing so meant he’d soon be out $10,000. When he refused to leave before this was resolved, the rep told him he was going to have him arrested.
As One Mile at a Time points out, there’s nothing in Hertz Unlimited Miles contracts that puts a limit on miles. Nor is there any clause that allows them to charge customers just because the company (or the rep handling the return) might feel the number of miles driven is excessive. Hertz is free to refuse to rent cars to customers who’ve put “too many” (whatever that means) miles on the vehicles they’ve rented, but it can’t pretend the contract says something it doesn’t just because someone has accomplished the astounding feet of racking up four months worth of mileage in a single month.
Hertz has since issued a statement about this incident. And, considering the source, it’s a pretty ok apology for an insanely ridiculous incident.
“Customer satisfaction is our top priority at Hertz, and we sincerely regret this customer’s experience at one of our franchise locations,” Hertz’s statement reads. “Per the terms of the contract, the customer will not be billed for mileage. Our franchisee is addressing the employee’s conduct and reinforcing our customer service standards and policies to ensure they are understood and followed consistently across our locations.”
Never mind. It’s not even really an apology. It simply says Hertz will not charge someone $10,000 for not violating the terms of the rental contract. That there’s some “addressing” going on at the franchisee level means this sort of thing likely won’t happen again at that particular branch, but it’s clear the company needs to do far more than react if it ever hopes to distance itself from the bad press the company and its employees seem to be intent on generating on a regular basis.
