A Hertz customer accomplished a new feat in the annals of rental car company disservice, actually being charged for a red light ticket before even renting the vehicle.
They rented the vehicle on May 15th at the Calgary Airport for a period of six days, starting at 10:30 p.m. However the agent at the airport logged the rental as starting at 10:30 a.m.
- They were hit with an extra day’s charge, beyond the period they actually had the car for
- And the previous renter “ran a red light at 2:33pm.” But since the system now saw them as having the car at the time, their credit card was hit with $436.50 for the bill.
It would have been impossible for the customer to have had the car at 2:33 p.m. because they were inflight on American Airlines. They provided copies of their boarding passes. Hertz agreed with them about the rental start time – they removed the extra day’s charge – but they still refused to budge on the red light ticket (or the extra fees associated the with the extra day – Hertz removed only the base rental charge). And now Hertz has refused to communicate further, it seems.
Much of the advice to this customer has been to just dispute the charges and that’s fine if you do not plan to rent from Hertz or any of their affiliated companies again. Even a righteous dispute might get you placed on their Do Not Rent list. Hertz has even been known to ban a customer’s descendants, too.
Considering the Hertz toll scam, charging customers who rent Teslas for failing to fill up the gas and of course a history of customers getting arrested just because they rented from the company – and Hertz refusing to admit its mistake lest the police stop believing them when they file false police reports, just getting charged for tickets written by police before you rented the vehicle doesn’t actually seem that bad in the scheme of things?
One Customer’s Idea: A Custom-Wrap In Case Police Show Up
In fact, isn’t this the least you expect to happen to you when you rent from Hertz? And it’s not even their first example of imposing time travel on a customer. Earlier this year I wrote about one person who tried to rent from Hertz for the very first time and found they’d already been banned by the company.