Related question:

What if I'm renting at an airport location but I'm not flying in? Obviously I have no flight information to enter. Will this mess up my reservation in any way? My concern arises out of this email I received today with the subject "Important: Your Recent Reservation" and this language:

Hertz Flight Information
 

You still get gold service without flight info.

You can always just check the "I don't have my flight information" option in the dropdown. They should have your car ready for you as a Gold at the time on your reservation.

The reason to add your flight information is for cases when your flight doesn't arrive at the expected time (early or late) - Hertz can adjust.

You can also check "I'm not arriving by flight or train"
At SFO, if you have this option checked, they can waive the Transportation and Facilities Fee. I'm not sure if this works for other airports.
I'm not sure if putting in flight information affects when you get the carfirmation. It definitely helps if you flight is delayed though. I don't have much experience since I don't rent much but at LAX when I flew there, I got carfirmation right when plane landed whereas SFO, I live close to there and I put 10am as pickup but didn't get confirmation til almost 11am. This is when I checked "not arriving by flight". I don't know if flight info affects the timing or maybe it's just my luck. I don't rent enough to test this out.

After several failures by LGA to provide Gold Service for my local pickups, I started entering a random flight that arrived around the time of my reservation to see if it would help; it didn't seem to make a difference.

A well-managed station should provide Gold Service for customers who aren't arriving on a flight. The poorly-managed ones are going to mess up, flight information or not.

I've received Gold Service at both airports and HLEs without entering flight info.

I find that if I do not enter a flight number (even if I select "do not have" or "not arriving by plane"), I am bounced to the counter. The car is not in an assigned stall. I am still recognized as a Gold, etc., but to me the most important part of Gold service is having the car ready to go.

My beef is that without the Carfirmation email, I don't know if I should poach something of the Gold Choice aisle or go inside and fight for my upgrade.

when you made the reservation, did they put gold counter as service type instead of gold canopy? or did you just not receive your carfirmation at the reserved time?
When I rented from SFO, I did not receive my carfirmation til an hour later from my reserved pickup time but luckily I was running just about an hour late that day so eventually I did get the carfirmation before I arrived at the airport.

During last week's outage from Southwest Airlines, I was supposed to arrive in Albany at 12:05 a.m. my flight was delayed an arrival time was approximately 3 45 a.m. the Hertz clerk was waiting on 7 customers, three which were gold. Checkout time on contract was 3:59am.

That's what I always thought, but found out differently yesterday at DTW. I arrived two hours late, and found they had cancelled my reservation and reassigned the car to someone else. The woman at the counter said "we didn't know you were going to be late." I said, "but I provided my flight number - don't you track the flight status?" And she said "no, of course not. Why would we do that?" :(

It was a fitting end to a less-than-stellar travel day. Thank goodness Marriott did not cancel my hotel room for showing up 3 hours later than my estimated arrival time.

I guess they only track flights on small airports locations