My partner booked a Hertz car hire coming out of Stanstead UK last week.
She used her credit card and used my name as the driver as she normally does. However, on arrival we discovered that a new rule had been introduced in Aug 09 making the booking impossible to fulfil - and so the booking could only be cancelled and rebooked - incurring a £35 cancellation fee.
They now insist that the name on the credit card must be the same as the driver name. Although their website will accept any name as the driver name, only on arrival do they tell you that the booking is impossible to fulfill. Furthermore, the booking was made and fully paid for weeks in advance and they would have known all along that the booking needed to be cancelled.
So, rather than fix their website forcing the CC name to be the same as the driver name, or rather than send an email alert to the client in advance warning of the problem, they choose to do nothing, wait for the client to show up and impose the cancellation fee.
Staff at the office were quite rude and simply responded 'You did not read the terms and conditions'
I consider this to be nothing short of a scam - in order to charge an additional £35.
I know of no other car hire company operating like this and we regularily use various other car hire companies at Stanstead and elsewhere - as have friends and family - but noone has had this problem before.