Boise

Last night I flew in from Detroit and landed around 11:30. I had booked my car online with Hertz some time ago, and input my flight information. When I got to the Hertz desk, there was another customer in front of me. The clerk told him that they were out of cars so he would have to wait awhile. Then a second clerk appeared to help me out. She said to me, "Same deal for you, you will have to wait 15-20 minutes for us to clean some cars and bring them to the lot." I asked her if this is standard treatment for a customer with a reservation. She said very rudely, "Look in my cupboard, we don't have any car keys in here, which means we are out of cars."

I just can't figure out how they could not have a car ready for me, when I had booked it some time ago, and input my flight info. They knew when I was going to pick-up the car..........its not like I showed up early or anything. Also, it was 11:30 at night, they had plenty of time to figure this out throughout the day. When all was said and done, they gave me a beat up Toyota Hybrid. 37000 miles on it..........it drives like a golf cart. I guess $80/day + tax on a corporate discount doesn't get you much anymore.

spades097

Should they have had a car ready for you? Yes. Is the answer to your question painfully obvious? Yes. You're frustrated in that situation, the staff is frustrated in that situation...everyone is frustrated. Asking questions like, "Is this the way you treat all of your reservations" does not help anyone. It obviously upset who you were dealing with and may very well have contributed to the reason why you got a 37,000 mile car.

It doesn't make the way she responded to you right but it's about understanding how to encourage people to help you.

JLewisinSyr

I agree with Spades, being condescending won't get you much in the service world. If you had responded with a more optimistic tone you might have been treated better.

I also have to ask, are you just a general renter, Gold, 5*, etc? If you're the first, honestly you don't hold much rank to them (not that any of the classes do much anymore). That doesn't excuse poor attitude, but the other classes are a little different and reservations are set aside a head of time, usually.

cordelli

Should they have a car? Yes, but at many of the smaller stations that's not how it works anymore. Cars come back late, they are short staffed and they take longer to clean, etc. Did they want to wait around another half hour or so at that hour of the night any more than you did? Probably not.

Did they have a better car to give you? Who knows, but I'm pretty sure any chance of you getting a better car pretty much went right out the window at the point of I asked her if this is standard treatment for a customer with a reservation

jwking

How can they not have a car for you? Easy.

They have other customers who were supposed to bring back their cars before you arrived. Those customers didn't bring back their cars at times promised. Therefore your car was still being used by other people.

They probably plan for this type of thing and have a few extras, but not a lot. Sometimes more people return later than expected so they don't have enough extras.

It's annoying, sure. Unbelievable? Not really.

Boise

I am a lowly 5* wit Hertz. And while I know that I should have been more friendly to the Hertz counter rep, I was upset. It was 11:30 pm, I had worked a full day and then flown MSP to DTW in a middle seat and DTW to HPN in a CRJ 200. I know that this is no excuse for poor behavior, but I am just stating the facts. I guess what started to get me upset with Hertz is the fact that the counter woman seemed so surprised that I was there to rent a car. After I got to the counter, she called a guy out in the lot to start prepping cars for another customer and me. Don't you think that they would have been proactive on getting this done before we arrived? The Hertz website claims that they will have cars ready for Gold Members one hour prior to your arrival at their station.

spades097

There are so many things that can go wrong in a day that will cause delays later on. I understand why you are upset. You expected your car to be ready and rightfully so. Unfortunately, not everything works perfectly.

jackal

Not really. Ever wonder how many people book a reservation, input flight information, and then don't show up? Depending on day/reserved car class/market and other variables, it can range anywhere from 5% to 30%.

Just like airlines and hotels, rental agencies overbook. Unlike airlines and hotels, which have fixed inventory, rental agencies are dealing with floating inventory. Anything can happen to a car:

• a previous customer keeps it late
• a previous customer gets it into an accident
• a previous customer drives it a thousand miles and it comes back due for an oil change
• a previous customer smokes in it and it's taken out of service for deep cleaning
• the car develops a mechanical issue and has to be taken to the dealer for service

Notice the common thread in all but the last one: "the previous customer." Even without overbooking, things can happen that affect availability.

So, balancing early returns, late returns, out-of-service cars, no-shows, walkups, and everything can make for very unscientific method of calculating a reasonable overbooking percentage.

Add in that rental agency booking engines don't have real-time access to actual inventory (adjusting rates, blocking reservations, and calculating availability is still very much a manual process), and it gets even worse. You can go to orbitz.com right now and book 500 compact cars at a rental agency. If you do it quickly enough, the agency likely won't even notice, since there is nothing in their systems that will alert them to this activity, and by default, most companies don't artificially capacity-control their reservations (since availability is so fluid--picking a number to cap reservations at is a bad idea). Then, in about 5 hours, a manager will run an availability report and see they are oversold by 300 compact cars and rush to do something about it. It takes another hour for someone to get in touch with the rate desk and issue a block; meanwhile, 50 more compact reservations trickle in while other people are booking reservations.

Even if booking engines had real-time access to availability, it wouldn't be accurate: unlike an airplane, where the system will sell 172 seats on a 737-900, the number of actual cars available to rent at any given time can vary hugely, and it gets VERY difficult to accurately forecast the actual number of cars that will be sitting on the lot.

It's both a little easier and a little harder at an HLE, where you're not seeing several hundred reservations a day: easier because your variances are lower (maybe 2-5 no-shows or late returns versus 50 at an airport location) but harder because you don't have the fluidity of constant turnover of cars. (If you're oversold at a large location, it's usually just a matter of waiting a couple minutes for a few extra cars to return; at a smaller location, it can be hours between returns.)

In any case, I hope I've given you a little bit of the background of why there can be issues. As others have said, is it the way things should be? Maybe not, but it's at least understandable how it happens.

4now

Haha. I've had a Hertz employee "walk" me late at night, too. I went straight to a competitor who put me in a car that night for the same price.

Why yes, that appears to be standard treatment at that location. Folks at corporate would say oh,no; but they are not at HPN at around 11:30 at night. The fact that this thread has shown up on Flyertalk indicates that this is the way things are at Hertz at HPN. They didn't have a car for the customer before you, did they? If this is not the way things are at that location, how likely is it that this thread would be here now?

I'd suggest you try another rental car company until such time when YOU are comfortable renting from Hertz again.

doctor15

While I agree at this point there is not much you can do... I think Hertz needs to reconsider how reservations have made.

I have had this exact situation happen to me at least 4x in the past 2 months, all at various small airport locations. If they are not able to get cars out on time on a routine basis, they should not take as many reservations.

jackal

Doing so would require a complete overhaul of Hertz's booking engine. I agree it should be done, but it's not a small project.

A valid solution, but how many fewer reservations? Playing the numbers game and balancing availability is not a straightforward thing.

JLewisinSyr

One of the easiest ways to help curb people from booking multiple rentals when their intent is to rent just one car is to impose a fee for cancellation and require a credit card number when booking. But there are many (I'm not one of them) that don't like the idea of a cancellation fee for rental cars.

jackal

Indeed. And one of the ways to help curb people from keeping their cars overdue and screwing up the availability is to impose a fee for keeping the car longer than originally intended. But there are many (and I am one of them) that don't like this idea. I'm just using it as illustration of how planning for availability in the rental industry is MUCH more difficult than it is with hotels and airplane tickets.

Auto Enthusiast

Avis has a rental extension fee, according to posts on that forum. Many have said they will take the car back and open a new contract to avoid it, and possibly make the branch waste their time prepping another car. However, that assumes you didn't stray far from the pickup city.

Let's say you're driving cross country and get delayed several hours by a tornado in South Dakota, and again several hours for the same reason the next day in Indiana. The best you can do is call the 800 number, from an area that has cell phone reception, and say you'll probably arrive a day late. This has not personally happened to me, thank goodness, but I heard of a few people to which it has.

Also, regarding the difficulty of inventory forecasting: When I researched my trip one-way from San Francisco to NY, my local NY Hertz office was listed as sold out for my arrival date, and remained listed as such even after I booked an inbound one-way. It's as if the online system isn't counting on it until proof of an actual arrival.

Granted, some here will say my example is not relevant for them, because it's the retail renters who do things like this. The corporate renters visit and are less likely to wander far from bigger cities, don't have to calculate what tiny town in the Midwest they'll be stopping in at night, always know their exact plans in advance and have their corporate travel desk book a car when they book everything else, have mega status with a generous flat rate corporate discount, and so have guaranteed availability, will be exempt from new rules that shove the retail renters out the door to shop solely on price, etc. As a retail renter who has a family member entitled to such discounts, that's fine, to each their own, but the rental companies should consider the needs of all their diverse customers.

jackal

Knowing the state of the rental industry's IT back-end systems as I do, I don't think it's a matter of the system not counting on the return as much as the fact that it will be returned to that branch is just "lost" on the system altogether--it disappears into a black hole.

Really, there are two reasons your local Hertz in NY didn't open up:

1) When a location is sold out, an adjustment of a single car isn't going to affect things. At the point the company puts the block in as sold out, they're (well, properly-run office, anyway--bad/lazy/unmotivated managers will sell out early and give them too big of a cushion) at the point of "Holy crap, we're 7% oversold--where are we going to get the cars to help our customers?!" They're not going to turn the faucet on for one additional arrival, especially since the faucet can either be turned on full spigot (which means two dozen reservations might come through in the next hour) or completely off. They can't just allow one reservation in.
2) Turning reservations on or off is a manual process. Someone has to notice that they now have an additional car available (due to the incoming one way) (not likely, since numbers are constantly being adjusted based on new bookings, cancellations, no-shows, declined rentals, etc.) and then make the decision to open for new bookings.

The problem is, there is no way to say "There are 8 cars available; open for 8 bookings." Not only can the IT systems not handle that kind of a request (without time-cumbersome manual capacity controls), but there may not be 8 cars. There may be 7 if someone keeps one late. 6 if one comes back with a broken windshield. 3 if there are three walkups that evening. Or there may be 9 if someone cancels, returns early, or tries to rent and doesn't meet the qualifications (not enough money on their credit card, etc.). And the reservations systems are not aware of these issues and so can't factor them in in real-time.

Inventory fluctuates constantly and is not fixed like airline seats or hotel rooms, so you can't mathematically tell the computer to only book a certain number and be OK.

Perhaps someday with the right combination of policies (fees for changing/canceling/extending/returning early and a completely overhauled booking system), rental car availability forecasting might become more of a science rather than the art it currently is.