Mayor of Denver Abandoned by Hertz – Customers Left to ‘Take the Keys and Run’ [Roundup]

by Gary Leff

News and notes from around the interweb:

  • Hertz employees abandoned the Syracuse airport location and at least 20 customers – including the Mayor of Denver – just took cars with keys in them. Just like customers day in and day out, even the airport authority couldn’t get ahold of anyone at Hertz corporate. Hertz reported a $1.3 billion net loss on $2.6 billion in revenue for the third quarter. (HT: Jonathan)

    “The counter remained abandoned from July 20th (8:41 p.m.) until July 21 at 6:57 a.m. The Hertz operation in Syracuse does not have computerized, telephone or other automated means of checking in and receiving keys,” according to the Syracuse airport.

  • The ability to confirm or waitlist American Airlines systemwide upgrades online is now available to all members with systemwides in their account.

  • Southwest clearly created a survey saying most of their customers preferred assigned seating to justify their move to assigned seating. Those choosing Southwest, with its current seating model, probably actually like it! But not everyone does, and it will solve some problems for sure…

  • Planes do need to be cleaned between flights.

  • Layoffs at Fontainebleau Las Vegas

  • Chase has opened its Sapphire Lounge in Phoenix, which is located in the Southwest high-D gates, a solid walk to the closest American Airlines A gates.

About Gary Leff

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 »

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Comments

  1. I didn’t see Southwest’s survey but from having taught college statistics can say that it is very easy to write one that gives the results you want. (In fact, it is a real art to create a survey without having an unintentional bias in it.) If SW asked questions like, “Do you feel more relaxed if you know what your seat will be ahead of time?”, or “Would you rather not wait up to get an early bird seat?” they sure would get responses “in favor of” assigned seating, though that isn’t what they asked.

    Then too if you ask a handful people, maybe picked because you know what their answers will be, and extrapolate them to “the public” the results are worthless. (In fact you could keep asking groups until you got the results that you wanted.) Getting a representative sample can be tricky but is absolutely needed for legitimate testing.

    Politicians, government agencies, lobbying groups and so on do this kind of sneaky “testing” all the time, knowing full well what the results will be. They figure that legitimate policy makers will never examine how they got their statistics. Honest scientists do not collect data in this fashion, and will keep testing their results without bias to be sure they are accurate, but the public rarely understands the difference.

  2. Math is the truth. Statistics are the lies that we make up about them.

    99.87% of all mass murders drank milk as children. Clearly we should outlaw milk

  5. Hertz is terrible now. They accused me of smoking in one of their cars, I have never smoked in my life!! In fact their employee was in the car to get the mileage, never said anything then. They wanted $450 “cleaning fee”., I told them to sue me, they actually had a lawyer contact me!!!!! He said they would settle for $250, I told them take me to court, it still cost me $200 for an attorney consultation. I have switched to Budget/ Avis.. They have been really good. Hertz lost my business, I figure about $10,000 over the last 4 years since they tried to scam me. Not a lot of money, but collectively, from what I read, nobody is using Hertz anymore due to the scams and gouging they do.

  6. Until AA makes viable amounts of space available for SWU’s it doesn’t matter much whether you can book online because there’s no availability for when you want to use them anyway. I may end up having my six certs die unused which makes me very unhappy.

  7. Regarding Hertz, I have not used them over the last 60 years (except on two or three occasions when I effectively had no choice). I have no empathy for their financial distress. As a college student in the 60’s my Dad signed for me to have the ability to rent cars from Hertz. Back then they had a satisfaction guarantee, where you would be refunded the daily rental if anything went wrong. I rented a car to go on a date, and on a snowy winter night, the driver side window stuck in fully open position, and both the date and the evening were ruined. The next day I submitted by written request, on Hertz’ form, to get reimbursed for the rental. No reimbursement and no answer. My Dad then made the same request – again no answer. I vowed to never do business with Hertz again. Over the last 60 years I have had many opportunities in my business to select, or de-select, rental car companies for my personal use and for large corporate use deals – I made sure Hertz was never a recipient of any of that business. Their lack of customer service and arrogance has cost them at least $500k. B of A got the same treatment from me by soliciting me as a graduating college student to apply for their credit card, and then turning me down for no reason – that has cost them an amount probably in the same league as what Hertz lost from discouraging my future business. Companies can be so dumb.

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