Hertz systems are down, along with those of their Dollar and Thrifty car rental brands. Customers are showing up, and they cannot rent cars. This has been going on for nearly two hours without information on when customers will be able to leave with the cars they’ve reserved.
We've been waiting 45 minutes already! @Hertz
— amy spyvee (@plamyinstereo) January 11, 2024
@Hertz your software is down globally? At rental center and no one can take out a car even tho it’s sitting right there. Update please
— Patrick Culliton (@PatrickCulliton) January 11, 2024
@Hertz I paid Uber to get here to pick up my car. Your agent refused to give me ride home and did not know when I could pick up the car. Can you do something? I hope at least, you would send me home and take me back to the place when your system is back on.
— Linchi Kwok, Ph.D. (@linchikwok) January 11, 2024
And on top of that, we’re just sitting here. No one is explaining exactly how and when we are going to be getting out of your garage.
— Michael Wilde (@michaelwilde) January 11, 2024
Hertz says,
Our team is working diligently to resolve the issue and restore impacted systems. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your patience.
However they haven’t offered specifics on when they will be able to resume renting cars. The cars are right there. The customers are right there. Hertz, Dollar, and Thrifty are just paralyzed.
I wrote recently that it’s a mistake to blindly stand in line, and you need to take control of your own travel. Nowhere is that easier than with rental cars, at least when agencies aren’t sold out completely. And especially during high demand periods, you want to get out ahead of problems!
Most rental car reservations still aren’t prepaid. You can just walk away and go to another company. Even with a prepaid Hertz rental, where the company was unable to meet its obligation to provide you the reserved vehicle, you should be able to get your money back, and your credit card company should back you up in this scenario if Hertz or its other brands are bad actors in this situation. Don’t stand around waiting for someone to give you a car, start looking for alternatives in situations like this one.
Silver lining: if you can’t rent a Hertz car, at least Hertz can’t have you arrested at gunpoint and jailed.
Technology is great until it doesn’t work. A business should have backup plans but they usually cost money so I think many just figure customers will whine but eventually will return as a customer.
Our Internet went out for about 30 minutes and the cell connectivity around here is poor so it was annoying but in our case, nothing critical.
Hertz is just broken in many ways.
What a dumpster fire of a company. Best to fire all the Execs and start over.
Its the people who have rentals they are due return today that are most at risk. I suspect lots of stolen vehicle reports being logged at close of business, for cars that Hertz does not realize are already returned
No issues for me.
Sometimes the karma bus goes slow.
Sometimes the karma bus goes fast.
But it will ALWAYS go 🙂
@tom Don’t underestimate Hertz on that one.
Stating obvious that Hertz and Boeing (AA?) are great examples of orgs that are led by tactical financial engineers that lack operational expertise and vision. I am suspect that a recent headcount review eliminated the headcount responsible for that “non essential” function or didn’t contractually hold an outsource service provider to account for basic operations. Yawn.
Hertz. Seriously. All joking aside — it’s not hard to imagine that there will be a string of cars reported stolen due to any rentals being made or returned while this mess is going on.
Ten years ago, Hertz was top ranked for business travelers. Now it’s reputation is the pits. I used to use Hertz about 80% of the time.
Of course they don’t know when it will be fixed! When something like this happens it’s mostly a matter of figuring out what went wrong–and there’s never any way to predict how long that will take. And if some idiot manager keeps bugging them for updates it’s just going to take longer.
Rarely is there a known time until it’s working again until not long before it is working.
They are criminals acting as a rental car company
@derek
Hertz was horrible ten years ago, too. As soon as my employer established agreements with other providers, I jumped ship and never looked back. National and Avis were much better than Hertz then, and remain so now.
@Mark
Ok, you’re right. They were good in the 1990’s and just ok 10 years ago.
Hertz in Germany has always been terrible in terms of looking for damage that you didn’t do.
I am finally done with Hertz. I had a one day award worth of points left over and was going to use it in 2020 but the pandemic hit. Hertz extended the expiration of some points for some people but refused to do it with me.
I considered redeeming it in January 2020 but the Detroit airport rental was so cheap (base rate in the $20’s?) that I didn’t use it.
I didn’t abandon Hertz for the points reason though. They are worse than that.
One bad solar flare and this will be life everywhere.
i can’t find any news on this outage elsewhere
in particular no thread on flyertalk:
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/hertz-gold-plus-rewards-423/
An enterprising Avis franchisee showed up with a bagful of keys at the Hertz line, saying “I got your car RIGHT here”.
Or is that just a rumor?
Any person who still continues to use Hertz after all the bad press about them is basically a nitwit.
All this talk about cloud computing and internet connections.
An old IBM mainframe and T3 connection will solve anything.
actually, that’s the problem with hertz
70% of their code is 40 years old
(narrator: it doesn’t run on an iphone)
James – You are 100% correct. After all of the well earned, ongoing bad press that Hertz has accrued the past few years, anyone renting from then is just asking for their to be problems with their rental. People who have ignored this reality have no legit reason to complain – they have been warned and still they rent from Hertz. The amazing thing is that when they rent and have a problem, they act surprised and become outraged. To quote Forrest Gump – “Stupid is as stupid does”.
When I was with Hertz, we would do paper contracts if the system went down. If you were a regular customer or a Gold Club/Presidents Circle member, you were getting a car. It happened rarely, but we had a plan in place. It was usually Visa/MasterCard that was down the few times I made the decision to honor the reservation regardless.
I didn’t get the promotion I deserved, so I left the company. Two offices I had helped manage along with a major account I landed went to Enterprise shortly after. My Area Manager wrecked a company car while drunk and a branch manager I worked for and was suspicious of, was terminated for embezzlement. All the good people also left not long after they cut back on benefits.
Then there’s the Tesla fiasco. Don’t get me started.
This company has been terrible for a while. They’ve outsourced customer service and very likely technical support as well.
Meanwhile, I now have a small fleet of “car sharing” vehicles. Screw Hertz.
Did Hertz hire the CTO away from Southwest airlines or something?
They’ve probably outsourced more than that. Ever since the days of Mark Frissora, Hertz is skating on thinning ice. System went down several yrs ago, while he was in command, due to a new reservations management system he signed off on, but which was prematurely released and trusted. He then went to Caesars Entertainment as CEO for one year (I was an employee then) and the board declined to renew his contract. Google him and see the judgment against him and Hertz former controller…Very enlightening.