I remember a time when I rented every weekend and swore that no other agency was like Hertz. Not National, not Avis, no one. Hertz was ahead of everyone in customer service, quality of the cars, and the #1 Club Gold rental process.

That was...the 1990s.

Now, several other agencies have pulled far ahead of Hertz on all three of those fronts above (the deterioration in customer service being perhaps the worst). I won't say loyalty is totally dead, but IMHO the last vestiges of it are the higher-tiers of National's program.

At this point, I view rental cars as purely a transactional/commodity type experience. I often do a query and see Hertz at $60 and Alamo at $20...easy choice to book Alamo, use their kiosk, pick my car, and be on the road basically just as fast as I would have with Hertz. I've also had pleasant experiences with Sixt, Silvercar, and a couple other niche players with a better experience than Hertz.

Only thing I *won't* do is use the third-tier agencies that often require waiting in a queue and dealing with upsell shenanigans and then fuel/damage scams on the back end. But other than that, there's not much loyalty left to any particular agency.