In my experience, Hertz has abysmal customer service. Getting a reasonable person (or in certain cases a person at all) on the phone is near impossible.
Last time I tried to cancel a reservation on the phone with them, it took almost an hour to convince the customer support that my reservation existed. During the course of this hour, they insisted several times that the reservation didn't exist. After about 20 minutes of this, I asked to speak to a manager and was flat out denied. Since their policy does not allow hanging up on a customer service call, I refused to get off the line until I was escalated to a manager, so over the next 30 minutes the support person called me several names, including "liar", "cheat", and told me to get off the phone and find something better to do.
Finally, I was escalated to the manager who managed to find my reservation and cancel it for me. Imagine my surprise a week later when I found out that my reservation had in fact not been cancelled and I had been charged hundreds of dollars regardless.
At this point I was fed up with their customer phone service, and resorted to emails instead. The same scenario played out again, and it took dozens of emails, credit card receipts, and 4 weeks of my time for them to finally refund me my money.
The whole experience was rather eye opening in an awful and surreal sort of way.
This would have been an ideal situation for you to request your cc company issue a charge back fwiw.
Edit:
Learned about charge backs here on HN, I've contacted a cc company twice to request one and in both cases the charging company promptly reached out and resolved the dispute w/o actually needing to follow through.
> In my experience, Hertz has abysmal customer service. Getting a reasonable person (or in certain cases a person at all) on the phone is near impossible.
They absolutely do. I had to rent a car, last minute (like very very last minute), and went to Hertz (I usually use Enterprise). I booked online and Uber'ed to the rental place. They had billed my (business) card for a prepaid rental...
... and then wouldn't rent the car because I "failed" their ID / etc verification, "most likely because my ID profile wasn't tied to my card" (it's a business card, this doesn't seem like anything uncommon).
And then wanted to refuse my refund because it was prepaid.
So I ask for a car, pay for it, go to get it, you won't give it to me, and then you won't give my money back to me?
That sounds pretty ridiculous, thank you for sharing the info about not hanging up on customers. I hope to never need it, but part of me worries that with enough bad luck, any customer support call can turn into this.
Similar experience with Sixt here, I'll never use them again and I use every opportunity available to steer potential customers away from them. Avoid Sixt like the plague.
>Finally, I was escalated to the manager who managed to find my reservation and cancel it for me. Imagine my surprise a week later when I found out that my reservation had in fact not been cancelled and I had been charged hundreds of dollars regardless.
What if that manager wasn't actually a manager, but just a colleague of the first person? That person told you you that he found and cancelled your reservation just for you to get off the line.
It took my assistant two weeks of daily phone calls to the Hertz management at Boston Logan to get them to refund me $250 for an erroneous charge for lost keys.
I've actually had fairly good experiences calling Heartz on the phone. Did you pay for the reservation ahead of time? If you didn't, then there's no need to cancel it. If you don't pick up the car your credit card doesn't get charged (at least with Hertz). I usually call and tell them I'm canceling the reservation out of courtesy, but even if you forget, if you don't pick up your car, the reservation is invalidated. I also once showed up 4 or 5 hours late at Hertz, and they told me they'd cancelled my reservation since I didn't show up. I think they said they only hold it for an hour from the reservation time. I believe Hertz also lets you cancel your reservation online if it's more than 24 hours in the future. So you'd only need to call if it's <24 hours in the future.
Oh, it's a computer bug, see, no biggie, we all get those, right? Those darn computers, they sure are a handful.
I can't accept that. What happened here is that Hertz, as a rational and responsible entity, reported lawfully rented cars as being stolen, knowingly putting inocent customers in grave danger. It was not a computer that did it, there was a rational decision to let this critical task run without human supervision on a dodgy system with insuficient quality control.
What's next, Autocad glitch destroys sky scrapper? Windows Update sends passenger jet to fiery death? As soon as you take the rational decision to let life critical tasks run on software, you are vouching for the correctness of that software and it's appropriateness for the task and you are responsible if the software fails.
This is precisely why I will never ever let a car auto pilot me and my family. If I am going to die, it better be because of my negligence and not because someone "oopsies" code.
One interesting point here is that the commonly-repeated mantra of "don't talk to police" would have likely resulted in this guy getting booked to jail, ending up with a mugshot on a couple of mugshot extortion websites, and generally getting his life upended.
> I think the sort of cerebral effect of feeling incarcerated made me extra lucid.
I mean, he was handcuffed for awhile by the side of the road over a clerical error. That genuinely sucks. But if he ever does find himself actually incarcerated I bet he’ll learn the difference.
Seems like all he had to do was to show the receipt, the cops called the rental place, cleared the stolen car alert. The car rental should probably be charged for falsify reporting the car as stolen. And as the police said, you could probably ask for a year of free rental for the inconvenience.
The police has to take some precaution because they risk their lives walking up to a stolen car, thus the not so friendly tone and hand-cups.
This happened to me! I flew to jacksonville FL, and they gave me a car. upon return they were all freaking out because the car was reported stolen. I was like wtf, here’s the keys, and got to my plane. I would have been pissed if I was arrested.
I drove a Hertz vehicle in Germany. Two weeks later, back home, I got a letter from a German town/municipality with a speeding fine. Included is a photo from the camera... the person in the photo is not me, and the timestamp is days after my rental finished.
Thankfully, they resolved it with a couple of (very confused) phone calls. Sounds like I got lucky.
The absolute impunity with which large corporations operate never ceases to amaze me.
Let say that I, as an individual, report my car stolen when I’ve actually lent it to someone, and then I do it again, and again, and dozens more times, resulting in false arrests and jail time for law-abiding citizens.
I’m pretty sure this couldn’t happen. I’d end up in jail myself for filing false police reports before I got anywhere close to double digits. But when it’s a giant company, they make a statement about how it’s extremely rare and continue on with business as usual.
It’s often said that “corporations are people,” legally speaking. This is clearly wrong. Corporations occupy a much more privileged position than people in the legal world!
"However, the penalties for falsely accusing someone of a crime range from none at all to potentially decades behind bars. It all depends on how the accusation is made, the intent of the accuser, and what is being accused."
Well the computer is controlled by a human, and the rental company is understaffed (the article mentions "poor office management"). This is why I blame the shareholders. Great power, great responsibility.
You would think that for a crime report to be accepted it would necessarily have someone's signature on it. That person is where the buck stops.
Furthermore, you'd think that after word got out about this happening several times, the police would start to look at lot more sceptically at an auto-generated Hertz stolen car report.
That's not really applicable here, because Hertz doesn't seem to have accused anyone. It sounds like Hertz, either due to badly designed procedures or employees taking shortcuts, can lose track of which car a renter has been loaned.
This leads them to find that a car that their system says is not rented out and so should be on the lot is missing [1]. They then report that missing car to the police.
The person with the car gets detained and maybe arrested because they were found in possession of property reported missing by the owner, not because they were accused of anything by Hertz. So at most Hertz would face civil liability under some kind of negligence theory.
[1] In most of these cases, the same lot with the missing car should also have an extra car present that their records say is out with a renter, so the total number of cars in the lot should match their records. There should be a sanity check somewhere that says if the total is correct, but a car is "missing", then they should identify the extra car, contact the renter who supposedly is out driving it around, and find out if that person somehow got the missing car.
None. The question of liability for automated crime reports is an interesting one, though. One would assume there is a person responsible for the operation of the computer in question.
"However, almost every time, erroneously charged renters are still fighting the charges they received in court and all the fines that come along with them."
These cases should have been resolved immediately. There's a growing impression that once the criminal justice system gets hold of you, you are not leaving without paying for something, whether real or not -- see also the recent case of people falsely accused on account of NYC's bogus DNA testing.
> However, almost every time, erroneously charged renters are still fighting the charges they received in court and all the fines that come along with them.
This surely is the bit that makes it unacceptable - mistakes happen, but if they do I would expect Hertz to step up, apologise like hell, sort everything out with the law, and pay a substantial "sorry" payment. How are these people still in trouble? Is this a case of Hertz refusing to accept liability because they are scared of law suits or something?
Hertz doesn't have to accept liability; they made a false accusation, there's laws against / about that. It's trickier in a court when a company does it though, there's probably alternative laws meaning companies get away with it.
I mean look at the DMCA and the thousands of invalid takedowns happening on e.g. youtube. Different thing though because it's not a legal accusation, people don't get arrested over it, etc.
Imagine if this happened to you, assuming this is true. The settlements should be big and somebody at Hertz should go to prison for at least a medium amount of time, effectively it’s filing a false police report.
There were multiple failures here, and not just with Hertz. How on Earth did someone spend 2 weeks in jail on this? This was a bug so they clearly had no evidence except their word. The actions of the police here warrant just as much scrutiny and reflection as Hertz.
Looking for heads to roll isn’t productive IMO, it’ll just end with scapegoats. I’m more interested in systemic changes to keep this from happening again. Although I do think it would be worthwhile to see if anyone tried to cover this up.
Whatever Hertz did or didn't do to let this happen (albeit rarely) is their fault. So plaintiffs clearly have grounds to sue Hertz. Police departments were also affected, so they arguably also have standing.
But criminal charges? Maybe if people were getting killed over it. Otherwise it's just a civil matter.
Stuff like this is why I don't understand why a potential employer should ever have access to a candidate's arrest record. Arrests mean nothing. Only convictions should be significant.
I think that Hertz had a good reputation about 20 years ago when I started regularly traveling for business. Of course, it could have just been that the firm had a contract with them while I was young and credulous. Anyway, Hertz squandered any reputation they might have had long ago. I haven't used anyone other than Enterprise in many years.
A number of cops probabbly still still arrest you but last time I rented rental cars come with a ton of paperwork with my name, the car identity, dates times, and etc all over it.
You'd think it would be a pretty easy thing to say, yo look at all this. It would seem unlikely an actual car thief would have a bunch of paperwork / make a bunch of paperwork with their own information on it.
Granted most cops aren't super detectives but even the non curious types know enough to ask the right questions even if only to help the suspected criminal incriminate them-self, going down the path of what all that paperwork even is would seem to work there too.
The car was different in these cases. But yeah, you'd think any receipt from Hertz with your name on it would be enough for the police to think twice before arresting you.
This is one reason I always opt for a printed-out rental contract when I rent a car and they ask, "Do you want us to email you the rental agreement, or do you want a paper copy?"
When I was in New Zealand in 2017, I rented an SUV for two weeks. Except I unknowingly screwed up the reservation and only booked one week, driving off unaware of this problem. So about a week later they began trying to call my cell, but didn't get through because I switched SIMs. I proceeded to drive around New Zealand with no problems for the next week, blissfully unaware. On the day before returning my car, I got pulled over for being over the speed limit. The cop let me off with a warning. It wasn't until I got back to return the rental that I realize that I was a full week late. Whoops.
The checkout process for Hertz is extremely slimy. While, I was filling out the form, the checkbox with a childseat didn't mention any kind of fee, so I assumed it was free. At the end of the form (which takes about 20m to fill out), it says "some fee may apply". When I got to the rental agency, it turns out that "some fee may apply" was 100$!! I threatended them with a big 1 star review on yelp, and they lowered it to a more reasonable 16$. needless to say, i will never risk using hertz again. they've shown, they can't be trusted.
Is it safe to presume that the renters didn't keep any of the rental paperwork? It sounds like keeping the paperwork in the car could've resolved a lot of this on the spot. Not that this should excuse Hertz, of course.
We rented a Hertz car in Las Vegas for a road trip for 3 weeks. Afterwards they charged our credit card multiple hundred dollars for a navigation system, which we didn't order and didn't have in our car. We complained and they promised to refund it, but didn't do it for over a month. Finally we asked the ADAC (German Car club) to resolve this for us.
We have far too much interconnectivity between automatic computers and the legal system. Computers should never be allowed to file legal paperwork by themselves. We don't know that's exactly what happened in this case, but there are thousands of other examples such as copyright trolling.
[+] [-] hertzthrowaway|6 years ago|reply
Last time I tried to cancel a reservation on the phone with them, it took almost an hour to convince the customer support that my reservation existed. During the course of this hour, they insisted several times that the reservation didn't exist. After about 20 minutes of this, I asked to speak to a manager and was flat out denied. Since their policy does not allow hanging up on a customer service call, I refused to get off the line until I was escalated to a manager, so over the next 30 minutes the support person called me several names, including "liar", "cheat", and told me to get off the phone and find something better to do.
Finally, I was escalated to the manager who managed to find my reservation and cancel it for me. Imagine my surprise a week later when I found out that my reservation had in fact not been cancelled and I had been charged hundreds of dollars regardless.
At this point I was fed up with their customer phone service, and resorted to emails instead. The same scenario played out again, and it took dozens of emails, credit card receipts, and 4 weeks of my time for them to finally refund me my money.
The whole experience was rather eye opening in an awful and surreal sort of way.
[+] [-] drewmol|6 years ago|reply
Edit: Learned about charge backs here on HN, I've contacted a cc company twice to request one and in both cases the charging company promptly reached out and resolved the dispute w/o actually needing to follow through.
[+] [-] FireBeyond|6 years ago|reply
They absolutely do. I had to rent a car, last minute (like very very last minute), and went to Hertz (I usually use Enterprise). I booked online and Uber'ed to the rental place. They had billed my (business) card for a prepaid rental...
... and then wouldn't rent the car because I "failed" their ID / etc verification, "most likely because my ID profile wasn't tied to my card" (it's a business card, this doesn't seem like anything uncommon).
And then wanted to refuse my refund because it was prepaid.
So I ask for a car, pay for it, go to get it, you won't give it to me, and then you won't give my money back to me?
[+] [-] saiya-jin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NullPrefix|6 years ago|reply
What if that manager wasn't actually a manager, but just a colleague of the first person? That person told you you that he found and cancelled your reservation just for you to get off the line.
[+] [-] ryanmarsh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] winter_blue|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yholio|6 years ago|reply
I can't accept that. What happened here is that Hertz, as a rational and responsible entity, reported lawfully rented cars as being stolen, knowingly putting inocent customers in grave danger. It was not a computer that did it, there was a rational decision to let this critical task run without human supervision on a dodgy system with insuficient quality control.
What's next, Autocad glitch destroys sky scrapper? Windows Update sends passenger jet to fiery death? As soon as you take the rational decision to let life critical tasks run on software, you are vouching for the correctness of that software and it's appropriateness for the task and you are responsible if the software fails.
[+] [-] _bxg1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warmwaffles|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minouye|6 years ago|reply
https://stevecheney.com/handcuffed-and-under-surveillance/
Sounds awful.
[+] [-] tgsovlerkhgsel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CPLX|6 years ago|reply
I mean, he was handcuffed for awhile by the side of the road over a clerical error. That genuinely sucks. But if he ever does find himself actually incarcerated I bet he’ll learn the difference.
[+] [-] in3d|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] koolba|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] z3t4|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] densone|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scraplab|6 years ago|reply
Thankfully, they resolved it with a couple of (very confused) phone calls. Sounds like I got lucky.
[+] [-] mikeash|6 years ago|reply
Let say that I, as an individual, report my car stolen when I’ve actually lent it to someone, and then I do it again, and again, and dozens more times, resulting in false arrests and jail time for law-abiding citizens.
I’m pretty sure this couldn’t happen. I’d end up in jail myself for filing false police reports before I got anywhere close to double digits. But when it’s a giant company, they make a statement about how it’s extremely rare and continue on with business as usual.
It’s often said that “corporations are people,” legally speaking. This is clearly wrong. Corporations occupy a much more privileged position than people in the legal world!
[+] [-] TomK32|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beeskneecaps|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] draugadrotten|6 years ago|reply
"However, the penalties for falsely accusing someone of a crime range from none at all to potentially decades behind bars. It all depends on how the accusation is made, the intent of the accuser, and what is being accused."
https://blogs.findlaw.com/blotter/2017/03/is-it-a-crime-to-f...
[+] [-] GorgeRonde|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caf|6 years ago|reply
Furthermore, you'd think that after word got out about this happening several times, the police would start to look at lot more sceptically at an auto-generated Hertz stolen car report.
[+] [-] Nasrudith|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|6 years ago|reply
That's not really applicable here, because Hertz doesn't seem to have accused anyone. It sounds like Hertz, either due to badly designed procedures or employees taking shortcuts, can lose track of which car a renter has been loaned.
This leads them to find that a car that their system says is not rented out and so should be on the lot is missing [1]. They then report that missing car to the police.
The person with the car gets detained and maybe arrested because they were found in possession of property reported missing by the owner, not because they were accused of anything by Hertz. So at most Hertz would face civil liability under some kind of negligence theory.
[1] In most of these cases, the same lot with the missing car should also have an extra car present that their records say is out with a renter, so the total number of cars in the lot should match their records. There should be a sanity check somewhere that says if the total is correct, but a car is "missing", then they should identify the extra car, contact the renter who supposedly is out driving it around, and find out if that person somehow got the missing car.
[+] [-] ahje|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mannykannot|6 years ago|reply
"However, almost every time, erroneously charged renters are still fighting the charges they received in court and all the fines that come along with them."
These cases should have been resolved immediately. There's a growing impression that once the criminal justice system gets hold of you, you are not leaving without paying for something, whether real or not -- see also the recent case of people falsely accused on account of NYC's bogus DNA testing.
[+] [-] jarofgreen|6 years ago|reply
This surely is the bit that makes it unacceptable - mistakes happen, but if they do I would expect Hertz to step up, apologise like hell, sort everything out with the law, and pay a substantial "sorry" payment. How are these people still in trouble? Is this a case of Hertz refusing to accept liability because they are scared of law suits or something?
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|6 years ago|reply
I mean look at the DMCA and the thousands of invalid takedowns happening on e.g. youtube. Different thing though because it's not a legal accusation, people don't get arrested over it, etc.
[+] [-] kaendfinger|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cle|6 years ago|reply
Looking for heads to roll isn’t productive IMO, it’ll just end with scapegoats. I’m more interested in systemic changes to keep this from happening again. Although I do think it would be worthwhile to see if anyone tried to cover this up.
[+] [-] mirimir|6 years ago|reply
But criminal charges? Maybe if people were getting killed over it. Otherwise it's just a civil matter.
Edit: fat fingers
[+] [-] loup-vaillant|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] habosa|6 years ago|reply
Once when I had evidence of their mistake on paper the clerk stared at the ceiling and said "I'm not looking at that" like some kind of toddler.
Use National/Enterprise. Same price, 100x better service.
[+] [-] jessaustin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snarf21|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|6 years ago|reply
You'd think it would be a pretty easy thing to say, yo look at all this. It would seem unlikely an actual car thief would have a bunch of paperwork / make a bunch of paperwork with their own information on it.
Granted most cops aren't super detectives but even the non curious types know enough to ask the right questions even if only to help the suspected criminal incriminate them-self, going down the path of what all that paperwork even is would seem to work there too.
[+] [-] mikelward|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 7402|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] titzer|6 years ago|reply
Thank God it wasn't America, apparently.
[+] [-] Scoundreller|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thorwasdfasdf|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] js2|6 years ago|reply
The future I fear isn’t 1984 nor Brave New World; it’s Brazil, and it looks like it’s already here.
I doubt I could file a false report and get away with it. Why aren’t the state AGs holding Hertz accountable?
[+] [-] jfoster|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ralala|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Causality1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miguelmota|6 years ago|reply