The utter inability to get a one-way rental is quite obnoxious. Also the bit about how he was able to reserve a car, but he wasn't a charter flight. Hertz's utter incompetence on the phone was striking as well from some sort of bizarro catch-22 world.
This doesn't make any sense. When I reserve a rental car at Signature or any other FBO, I may or may not give my tail number, but I'm pretty sure that no one has ever checked. I could have arrived in the front door and rented the car. (No one does this, because the cars are more expensive rented this way than from a typical rental desk as the FBO takes a cut and sometimes the airport adds a cut as well.)
This sounds like Hertz just blew it or Signature didn't want to rent a car one-way to this guy and fobbed it off on Hertz.
[0] - FBO -> Fixed Base Operator, basically a service station for private aircraft (whether charters or not; most are not).
Is this current knowledge? I used to pick up one way rental cars from the airport but the last few times I tried ~5 years ago the clerk wanted a flight number. I didn’t bother to lie.
I don’t rent one way rentals from an FBO (because I have to come back and fly the plane home anyway), but when I do reserve local rentals for a trip, I give times but not tail number generally. That’s all current.
The entire rental car experience is ridiculously complicated and inefficient. Look at the difference in renting a Zipcar (owned by Avis) and a regular rental car company. With Zipcar I can reserve a car in minutes, pick up the car I actually reserved without waiting in line or even going into an office, get charged the amount I was quoted and not find out it's twice the cost from some hidden fees and taxes.
Zipcars are great, but their coverage has shrunk over time. There's maybe a 10th of the number of vehicles, and back then Enterprise (formerly car2go) had an almost equal number of vehicles (Enterprise shut it down a while back.
I don’t rent a ton of cars but Avis is the only company that seems to have it together. A couple months ago I rented a car from them only because it was the cheapest option. Got an email when my flight landed with my exact car and what spot it was in in the rental car garage. When I got to the car, the keys were in the ignition and I just drove away. I was very surprised how pleasant the experience was.
That seems like normal this-world Hertz incompetence to me. The best and brightest people do not sign up to stand behind a booth at a car rental agency.
> The best and brightest people do not sign up to stand behind a booth at a car rental agency.
According to the article, the guy behind the counter at Hertz agreed with the author about their insane charter flight policy, and tried to help him fix the situation, but was powerless. The red tape was all above his head and much of the confusion/frustration was on the phone with customer support.
If anything, the "best and brightest" folks in Hertz management who drafted the policies that both the phone assistant and the person behind the counter had to try to navigate (and who both acknowledged the policies they were struggling against were dumb) are the ones who failed big time here, not the every men that GP is insulting.
To be clear though, I doubt that someone in Hertz management sat down and devised this scenario deliberately to save a few bucks, hoping that nobody with social media clout would ever run into it. My guess is that it's the result of a web of misaligned incentives and organizational cruft that resulted in a creaky but mostly-working system that nobody ever fixed.
You can use your imagination to fill in the details for fun - maybe 8 years ago some stressed-out shift manager without enough people to work the rental desk (due to a freak corporate-mandated hiring freeze) got a call asking for updated contact information for his location and he hesitated a moment and the caller, a temp on loan for the day, helpfully suggested that they just leave the extension blank for now, and marked the location done. And over the next 8 years the company was making its numbers and there was no need to rock the boat and dump a bunch of money into management consultants to tear everything up and start over fresh, and the VP of airports just had a grandkid and was letting his lieutenants run things on autopilot, and the CEO was happy as a clam with his 2pm golf games and expensed steak dinners and had no idea that anything was wrong, etc etc etc etc. The WSJ exposé following Hertz's surprise Chapter 11 filing practically writes itself.
