Wingrider

Hola Hertz rollers....

I put this in the best deal finder thread but wanted to open this up to the community about Hertz really gouging for a 1 way rental on our upcoming vacation on the east coast. I tried to leverage my 24k points with them but for 17 days of rental they only agreed to 4 days of a credit and it's costing me 10k points.

I understand it's a one way rental, but geez burning 10k points to take "4 days of rental " off the charge seem excessive. I mean you can do 2 weeks of a rental for less than 10k IIRC. Charge me $500 bucks for a return charge and comp me the 2 weeks but over $700 seems absurd. Unless I'm completely out of touch. Spoke to Hertz CS and then to a Supervisor and they said that's what the system gives them. No sort of appreciation or flexibility for being a President's Circle member for something like 6 years running. I mean talking to the counter people at the airport seems like a breath of air compared to the headset wearing drones on the 800 line. No interest in trying to work anything out. Not even a "hey we'll throw in water bottles" :-) I wasn't trying to totally ride for free but wowzers on this one.

I know it's only a day or 2 before I do this but it's been bugging me since I booked it and wanted to vent/seek advice. I may not have much choice. Any help or direction would be appreciated. I left my rental info below as was put in the other thread just for a point of reference.

As I said in that thread- I may be able to reward a TF'er if they help broker a better Hertz deal.

Thank you for reading my half-rant and I'll await any thoughts on this.

guv1976

Drop the car in Florida for $5/day, and use the savings to fly to PVD.

Dave Noble

If the booking wih Hertz is expensive , how much is another rental company ?

Wingrider

Wow that sounds like an interesting side trip. lol

I'd be up for it if I had more free time. For that, I'd just fly back out o FLL or something.

Very clever and you get gold star.

I confess I didn't look, but it was about potentially saving a lot using my points. Now that you have me thinking, I will tech around. A decent full size car rental is not only offered by Hertz.

Thx for widening my trapped by a brand mentality.

Cymro

Can you do two or even three rentals (i.e., if your aim is to drive between IAD and ATL then that would only take a day or two and you could still book two weekly rentals on points and save a ton!)

Wingrider

Hmmm Interesting idea. I'll have to look at my travel route.

cestmoi123

I ran the same reservation, and I come up with $761, after using 11000 points to cover one week of the rental. That's without any coupons or discounts.

Depending on your route, you might be better off structuring this as a seven day rental (which you could cover entirely with points), and a ten day rental (where you could cover 7 of the 10 days with points), dropping off the car wherever you are on day seven and immediately picking up a new one. That way, you could use 22k points to cover 14 of the 17 days.

Often1

How is it gouging? It's just expensive because that's what people, including you, are willing to pay for the convenience of dropping a car off far from its "home". One ways x WAS are always expensive because nobody drives one-ways to WAS (or perhaps few).

But, consider that you can fly WAS-ATL for $70-90, why drive at all?

Cymro

WAS-ATL was just an example... the point being that you wouldn't need the same car the whole time if you wanted to do a one-way. No idea what the true destinations might be.

cestmoi123

Per the OP's listing on the good deal thread, ALB-PVD.

MSPeconomist

That's not such a great distance to drive the car back to its starting point when the rental exceeds two weeks.

My impression is that the major airports see a lot of cars coming and going, but some smaller stations seem to want to keep their own cars. Maybe it's just tradition or there could be differences between owned and franchised agencies.

Auto Enthusiast

I'm almost certain all agencies at both ALB and PVD are corporate, and as shown on their website, Hertz certainly is.

The difference compared to larger facilities is likely, as you said, due to smaller, and thus less flexible, inventory. Sometimes you might see exceptions for very popular routes where the demand is so great, everyone wants a slice, and so one way rates converge to something relatively low.

docbert

The fundamental problem here is that the one-way points rate is per-day, so a multi-day one-way will be much higher than a one day one - even if you're going between the same two locations.

I recently did a 4 day rental from Nashville to Memphis. Rather than paying 5300 points for a 4-day one-way, I did a 1 day paid rental (weekend, cost about $35) from the airport to a HLE in Nashville that was not counted as one-way.

About 24 hours later I swung via the HLE, and did a return/re-rent of the same car, this time on a 1-day one-way points rental (1325 points).

The next day in Memphis I did the same thing again at a HLE - this time re-renting for a 2-day points rental (1350 points) returning to the airport.

End result was 2675 points + $35 instead of 5300 points, plus about 15 mins of time to do the two return/re-rents. Of course this depends on having a nearby HLE location you can use, which won't always be the case...

rbAA

My East coast trips always involve a one way, FL drive out in May/June and FL drive in Nov/Dec. Did a one week JAX-NYC HLE in June for about $65 al in and doing a one week RDU-MCO next week. $70 all in. It's $500/wk if I rented at MCO and awards are at the max rate if even available. Needed a car, so this was better than flying into FL. Sorry to hear about your experience. Maybe a few more details would have been called for. But, sorry I can't help you.