You take an awfully hard line on a mistake. Given that 99% of the time when she rents with National, it is for business (in fact, I believe this was her first personal rental - I normally handle any of our personal rentals) it is natural that when she made her reservation the browser input all of her normal information. She is "entitled" to the rate but realized at the time of rental that since this was a personal rental it shouldn't be on the company account.

You make it sound like she was trying to game the system in some way. She was not. Unlike us FTers, she wouldn't even know how if she wanted to.

And when the corporate rate represented a $5 savings at time of reservation (I'm basing that on today's rates - we'll never know the difference on hers since that was the only rate she looked at), I absolutely believe a $45 upcharge is ridiculous. Sure, they can make up whatever walk-up rate they want and punish her for the mistake, but she did her business rentals with Hertz for a long time before I encouraged her to switch to National and she'll have no problem switching back. National will get their one time extortion fees but they will lose a customer (actually, two).

I own a business and if I used a customer mistake to drive a cold long one you know where, I wouldn't expect them back. There's a big difference between what you *can* do and what is the right thing to do to keep customers your customers.