Originally Posted by docbert

Hertz has a number of different ways to charge one-way rentals, which seem to depend on the locations involved, the phase of the moon, and which direction the wind is blowing.

One of those method is to charge a drop fee, which doesn't sound like what happened for your rental (or at least, not only)

One of the other methods is that they jack up the day rate - and that increase is often the same regardless of whether it's a 1-day rental or a multi-day rental. I just looked at EWR-EWR and EWR-CVG and it looks like that's what they are doing here. For the dates I looked at, the one-way rate was about $150/day more, regardless of the length of the rental. For a 1-day rental like you ended up doing, that obviously wasn't too much (well, relatively at least). But presuming your original rental was say a 5 day rental, it would have bumped the price ~$750.

Sometimes they do both - a different rate plus a drop fee...