cestmoi123

A good business would be using whatever tools minimizes the after-tax vehicle cost per mile.

Why buy if you can rent for less?

Orange County Commuter

Years ago I knew someone who got one of those letters from Hertz. Let me say that Hertz was right LOL! So my experience is you have to work at getting this letter (The guy I knew for example once spent an entire evening trying to "stress" the transmission to see if it would break!)

I have also had a coworker who purposely "broke" things to get "Free upgrades" Considering OPs bragging on upgrades and the statement about "refunds and credits" , it makes me wonder!

I don't see that the rental car company did anything wrong, if they don't find us profitable there's no "bill of rights' that protects our ability to rent from them LOL!

Auto Enthusiast

Most rental contracts I've seen say something like, "You may not transport passengers or goods for hire." I can't help but wonder if the OP may have been involved with something like that.

In the Hertz forum, when the "excessive miles" policy was introduced, a rep elaborated that part of the problem were couriers who would rent the car for one day and do roundtrip NY to FL, for example.

lsugolfer

Also looked at OP's history and it seems like he was often bringing luxury cars on one ways to a remote location (SGU). Local airport rep doesn't care because he's got a better fleet but if LAS has 2 luxury vehicles on the lot and SGU has 4 or 5...someone has to get them back where they are in demand.

nd2010

I rent from National and Alamo often (monthly) and put well above the average mileage on the cars. I also took full advantage of the Florida drive in and drive out promotions, taking cars all over the country. I even once put 10000 miles on a rental. I'm pretty sure Enterprise Holdings lost money by renting to me.
I only had one instance of damage, which was fully covered by credit card insurance, including the loss of use fee. I did once get a brand new car with 500 miles on it, and returned it with 8500 miles.

hedoman

What you are describing is kids play compared to OP.

Thanks for the honest posts by OP. As a person that hasn't owned a car for many years, it reminds me to be careful not to push the limits.

piper28

The 1000 miles past service part stood out to me because of the car we currently have out. Wife currently has the rental, and for various reasons we ended up with this one being about 40 days. We realized just recently that the sticker inside the door said that the preventative maintenance due was right around where the mileage is right now, but we're due to have it for another 10 days or so, so figured we'd try swapping it out. Moral of the story is don't try swapping the rental car out on the 30 day mark where they reset the contract, especially if you're doing it at a location other than the one you got the car. They ended up not being able to do the swap, but at least were also able to tell her that the maintenance really wasn't due yet, so we hopefully won't have a problem with that.

Looking at the original post, what bothers me most from the things that they list is that in general those don't seem to be things that are in the renters control, and could easily be defects in the car. The starter motor and engine thing especially seem unlikely to be caused by the renter barring someone going far out of their way to cause damage to the car, and I don't have any reason to believe they were doing that. I do tend to think most of the stuff there was listed simply to give them more coverage for wanting to dump him because of the mileage issue. But it does kinda make me wonder whether reporting any problems with the car when you turn it in is really in your best interest.

B767capt

I wonder if the post about renting vs buying got back to National.

At the end of the day it makes sense that your rentals might be costing them vs turning a profit.

Tedgrrrr

My concern with all this, and it's more of an Enterprise issue than National - but the computer will be way off on Mileage. One one recent reservation I drove 36 miles, but the mileage on the computer was incorrect and so when I returned it my receipt said I drove 7,000 miles or something in one day. I had another similar issue with National where it was actually an issue because it was a one way from Westchester to Philadelphia, and they thought I drove 5000 miles. Fortunately, I returned the car five or six hours after getting it and the agent in Philly reasonably understood that I was not in fact driving 1000 miles/hour, and adjusted the mileage to the actual distance between the two.

Hopefully these types of issues won't get any of us banned!

pbiflyer

Hadn't thought about it before. I just turned one in where I drove from the airport to hotel and back. They couldn't print the receipt right there.
When I went to my email to retrieve it, it showed I drove just over 1200 miles.

Nitehawk

I've had this happen a few times as well. I've mentioned it but they say don't worry about a thing!

Yesterday I drove 900km on a 1 day rental, but it was with budget. I actually had a national car out and paid to park it at YVR where I grabbed a better car (15 Mustang GT) from budget for the drive.

Happy to see Tedgrrrr around.

powermax

To avoid that kind of issue and to make sure that I have the right mileage on all my receipts I always confirm the current mileage at the exit booth, because that usually happens when the correct mileage from the previous renter was not entered when they returned the car.

Often1

All of this simply points to better use of the data which has always been there, but likely never used routinely to look at profitability. For the same reasons that you do more to keep your HVC's happy, you fire those who drag you down.

Tedgrrrr

In theory this makes sense - but then you get to places like Westchester Airport, Philadelphia Train Station, etc., where they don't have Emerald Club aisles and it would take a long walk (especially in Philly) to "correct" the mileage, which is usually blank to begin with because they pre-print contracts to save time.

Same issue in Manhattan and Brooklyn... they preprint contracts so you don't often see the mileage because no car has been assigned, though I suppose you could just ask them to print it again - something which erks people in the emerald club booths at airport locations!!

roberino

It sounds to me like the location management wasn't looking after the cars and needed a fall guy to take the blame for the damage sustained.