Just my opinion, but rental giant Hertz needs to invest in some massive employee training classes. We brought you the story about a Hertz employee charging a customer $277 for gas IN AN ELECTRIC TESLA. If you missed it, you can catch up here.
This comes after numerous cases of Hertz reporting vehicles as stolen when there were legitimate people renting them who were arrested. That bit of ignorance cost them 168 million dollars to settle.
You can’t forget about Hertz going “all-in” on electric vehicles, which nobody wanted to rent, resulting in massive losses and a bankruptcy filing.
Now we have this case. Try to wrap your brain around being in this customer’s shoes! He rents a car with unlimited mileage, drives it 25,000 miles, and the Hertz clerk insists on charging him $10,000 in mileage fees. Can you imagine this happening to you? The clerk doubled down on his ridiculous behavior by telling the customer to leave and if he didn’t, the clerk said he would call the police. Now, I’ve never subscribed to the adage of “the customer is always right”. They aren’t. However, in this case, the customer was absolutely, positively, 100% correct. Unlimited means, well, UNLIMITED after all. This was all caught on tape:
The customer pointed out the contract stated he could drive unlimited miles, and he didn’t sign anything agreeing to pay extra if he drove a lot of miles. The clerk’s response was that he also didn’t sign anything saying he would be allowed to drive 25,000 miles in a month. Wait, WHAT? So, we are going to be bound by what is NOT written on the rental contract instead of what is actually says? Nice try, clerk, but that won’t fly in court.
TheDrive.com also covered this story and reached out to Hertz. In an apology, the company said:
“Customer satisfaction is our top priority at Hertz, and we sincerely regret this customer’s experience at one of our franchise locations. 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.”
Inquiring minds wonder a number of things: How did this Hertz clerk come up with the arbitrary figure of $10,000? It certainly couldn’t have been a calculation, it had to be just a number pulled out of the air. Do these people at Hertz not have a supervisor they can call when they don’t know what to do, or even worse, was the clerk a supervisor? How did the customer drive 25,000 in just 30 days? That is over 800 miles a day. Mathematically, he would have to drive almost 14 hours out of 24 per day without stopping. It’s possible of course, but WOW.
I suppose I should be thankful to Hertz. They’ve been a regular contributor of contact to the Car Pro Newsletter for quite some time.
Photo Credit: Hertz.