Category Archives for car rental.
Tarikh Campbell rented a car at the Newark airport Avis. He parked the white Toyota Camry at his home in Teaneck, New Jersey. But at 10:30 p.m. on the night before he was supposed to return the car and fly home, he noticed it was missing. It appears as though Avis stole it.
A reader shares that he showed up at the Denver airport Hertz with no cars, 67 people on the Presidents Circle list waiting, and some customers reporting standing there for more than 90 minutes and counting. Fortunately there’s one almost sure-fire way to cut the queue.
A family visiting Maui rented a car for 2 days and it cost them $1100. But an $1100 rental was only just the start for the Agors. Someone hit their rental car. So they called the police to file a report. And the police cited them.
I’ve argued that Hertz needs to do something pretty basic, even before properly balancing the number of cars they have with the number of rental reservations they accept, and growing their fleet of cars to meet demand. Hertz needs to stop filing false police reports against their customers. Now they’ve got a new issue I haven’t seen before. They appear to be going after a reader for failing to return a car that they never even rented.
Rental car prices have in many cases become the biggest expense of a trip. Rental companies offloaded vehicle inventories during the pandemic, and didn’t place orders. The market for cars is tight. And travel has picked back up. So there’s more people looking for cars than there are cars. Prices are sky high.
On my most recent trip Hertz was oversold by more than 60 and they had just one car. I got it. In situations like this I recommend tipping. You can debate in the comments whether the current circumstance justifies making more than one rental reservation, from different car companies. That fails Kantian ethics (how would this look if everyone did it?) but it’s a guerrilla tactic in a Mad Max-style world where everyone is out for themselves.
A reader shares that the Dollar Rent A Car line was out of control, stretching far enough back that it was going to take well over an hour to get a car. And things were deteriorating because a woman tried to rent a car with a debit card (which is allowed) but was being refused.
The woman became irate, not just at the clerk behind the counter but at everyone around. She reportedly hit something on the counter and smashed it into the Dollar clerk’s head. He started to bleed.
The very first legal nastygram this blog ever received – 17 years ago, if memory serves – was from Avis over posting a list of their discount codes. There was nothing wrong about such a posting, of course.
People have long used discount codes to reduce the cost of their car rentals. Some they may be eligible for, others that are for employees of specific companies or members of specific associations that they aren’t eligible for.
From reviewing cases reported on in media, and the cases I’ve heard about from readers, it appears that there’s an issue when customers change vehicles or extend rentals but the changes don’t get reflected properly in Hertz’s systems.
One customer was held in jail for 40 days over a rental that occurred eight years earlier Another reported renting a car that Hertz had already reported stolen. It clearly wasn’t stolen because they had it in their possession and rented it.
You used to be able to earn with Delta, Hilton, and JetBlue all at the same time when you spent money on Lyft rides. Then the Lyft-JetBlue partnership ended. Still, stacking earn with both Delta and Hilton for the same transaction was nice. But it appears that’s coming to an end July 1.
Everyone thought the pandemic was going to last longer and be worse for the economy, and made plans that they’ve now come to regret. Rental car companies sold off their fleets. Cars are scarce because manufacturers didn’t order the chips they’d need. So we’re looking at long rental car lines, and in some cases sky high prices up to $600 a day.
There’s an easy solution that would help customers, airlines, hotels, and more – but airports are fighting to protect the rental companies and keep prices sky high.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
