Originally Posted by
JLewisinSyr
Here are the T&Cs as it relates to pre-paid reservations:
All that said, don't put much faith into this, in the end, if they don't have a car or oversell, the best that will happen is you will get a refund.
It angers me that the insinuation is that this only applies to prepaid reservations (and they don't mention making alternate arrangements with other companies and covering the difference, either). This is how it should be for ALL reservations (and how it was with all reservations at the company I managed).
IANAL either, and I have never been quite clear whether contract law applied to a reservation where consideration had not yet been exchanged (i.e. not prepaid) but was promised to be exchanged later.
This Forbes article, though, does seem to shed a little light on it:
The “thing of value” being exchanged–which every law student who ever lived has been taught to call “consideration”–is most often a promise to do something in the future, such as a promise to perform a certain job or a promise to pay a fee for a job. For instance, let’s return to the example of the print job. Once you and the printer agree on terms, there is an exchange of things of value (consideration): the printer has promised to print the 5,000 brochures, and you have promised to pay $250 for them....
Although the exchange-of-value requirement is met in most business transactions by an exchange of promises (“I’ll promise to pay money if you promise to paint my building next month”), actually doing the work can also satisfy the rule.
If, for instance, you leave your printer a voice-mail message saying you’ll pay an extra $100 if your brochures are cut and stapled when you pick them up, the printer can create a binding contract by actually doing the cutting and stapling. And once he does so, you can’t weasel out of the deal by claiming you changed your mind.
Additionally,
this NOLO article helps to further define what consideration is:
Consideration is the benefit that each party gets or expects to get from the contractual deal -- for example, Victoria's Secret gets your money; you get the cashmere robe.
In order for consideration to provide a valid basis for a contract -- and remember that every valid contract must have consideration -- each party must make a change in their "position."
It seems to me that a rental car reservation, even if not prepaid, satisfies the three elements of a contract:
-Offer: Hertz says they will offer you a vehicle for $X price
-Acceptance: You accept Hertz's offer by completing the reservation
-Consideration: You promise to pay the price Hertz told you, and Hertz promises to provide you a car (both parties have promised a change in position)
Again, IANAL, but it sure seems to me that the act of promising the change in position is enough to trigger the existence of consideration, and as such, this is legally enforceable, and when Hertz fails to live up to their end of the bargain, you have legal recourse, regardless of whether you have prepaid or not.
Viewing a rental car reservation as not an enforcable contract seems to contradict the basic tenets of contract law. Otherwise, what's to stop you from signing a contract with the painter that he would paint your house next Tuesday in exchange for $5,000 (with payment upon completion and with penalties of $100/day for late completion), and then him never showing up and simply saying, "Well, he didn't give me any money, so it's not a valid contract"? Or maybe that's how it works and a lawyer needs to tell me so.
FWIW, not that it's worth much (coming from a journalist), but
this Chicago Tribune article does say:
Yes, your reservation is a binding contract, and if a hotel or rental car company can't fulfill it, you have legal recourse.
I'll take that with a big grain of salt, though, until someone with knowledge of the law comes and clarifies. And of course, that same article states immediately afterward:
But access to small claims court weeks or months later doesn't help when you're standing at the counter, late at night, and the agent tells you "no rooms" or "no cars."
It'd be nice, though, if we could get a few cases through the courts that clarify that reservations
are binding such that the rental agencies will wake up and realize they do have to honor them and can't simply back out of them.