Reservations but no cars available
 

Sitting outside Hertz West 83rd Street in Manhattan with a line of people on Sunday at noon. Everyone has reservations but there are no cars available.
Counter people keep saying another 45 minutes, but they admit they have no real idea. Other customers say they have been waiting for hours and they have started a wait list.
Does Hertz have any responsibility to provide a car at the time specified on the reservation? Is there any consequence if they don't?
The funny thing is the online system keeps accepting new reservations for pick up even when there are no cars.
FYI- PC status doesn't help- they really don't have any cars to give out.

Numerous media reports suggest this has been a constant theme in Manhattan this year - and not just at Hertz. Seinfeld captured it years ago:


Bottom line is you can't count on a car anymore.

Welcome to our World! In Honolulu I was lucky last year and only waited 30 minutes, people who were rude to the employees were still sitting there when I left. In Savannah, GA I waited two hours for a car, they had them but didn't have enough people to clean them and too many returns at the same time to manage them well, people finally asked if they could just have dirty cars. In UP Michigan I arrived late at night to find no car, they had two for my family, and the other 9 people from the flight were on their own, no Uber, no Lyft, and a two taxi town. I was able to get my rental two days later though, but only because I showed up at the counter prior to that nights flight arriving. In Orlando, I had an hour wait on one of my trips. In Nashville they had cars but they were delayed, I had to wait about 45 minutes, only because I opted to get an SUV (what I rented) instead of the sedans they kept pulling up with, ended up with a four door Jeep Wrangler Limited. One of the worst experiences was my return to LaGuardia after picking up my rental in Philadelphia, the rental signs for my terminal were all gone due to construction, I had to stop at another rental agency to ask them where my return location was. Good thing I left early that morning!

It sucks that you have no way of knowing if the location you are coming to is going to have cars, or if there is some other delaying issue.

Ran into this situation at Kona last spring and just like TIGA31328 says, we waited about 30 minutes but there were a few people there who were still waiting when we drove off. It may have been their attitude or they were picky about the class of car. Hopefully things have gotten better this year.

Hardly a new problem, just worse these days. First happened to me over 30 years ago in Orange County, CA. Fortunately, I was able to go to a different rental desk - a competitor.

Over the past three decades, things have become much more hostile to customers/renters, haven't they? It seems all the obligations are from us to the rental companies. At least they didn't report the vehicle they didn't give you as stolen by you!

This happened to us in Brooklyn last October: Only 2 clerks working, and no phone number for "management".

This isn't new.
The worst was actually mid 2020 late 2021. I live in SF and don't have a car, so would rent up to 2 times a month for meetings in the far suburbs.
For the period above, not only did rental prices jump from $12-$50ish to $70-$110+, I had to wait 2 hours or more to get one.
The garages were literally empty and the rental car companies were turning around returned vehicles as fast as they could.
Note this wasn't just Hertz - I had this experience with multiple outfits including ones not in the Hertz family.
I also had issues in other cities: rental cars in Orlando and Miami were nuts in 2021 although doing a one way from say, Miami to Orlando would net a rental cost half or less of renting in either city and returning to the same location...
It is clear that the rental car companies went overboard in downsizing their fleets in 2020 and 2021 only to then hit the new car supply issue.

Dollar at the Atlanta airport on a Friday night/Saturday morning a few weeks ago (Jan 28/29): a tad of snow, flights cancelled, etc., and I figure that Dollar had rented out a lot of vehicles at a high price, while leaving customers who had booked earlier (but arrived later) in a lurch. We had reservations and waited for a couple of hours in a very slow-moving line, with cars being rented out as they became available. By 2 am they called it a night as no more cars were coming in and the agents went home, with 50 or so customers still in line, including us. I think it is time that car rental companies are held to the same standards as airlines, with financial repercussions to the car rental agency when they overbook like that. Needless to say, I have cancelled my upcoming reservations with Dollar, but unfortunately other car rental companies may not be much better.

Not excusing the rental companies, just playing devil's advocate.

Is it possible some of the problem comes from other renters not returning cars when they're supposed to? Are the rental companies like hotels, limited in what they can do to guests who overstay their welcome? I don't know -- I'm just raising the question. Since their reservations systems worked so well for so long I have to presume they're programmed to take into account expected return times.

If there is nothing preventing it, I'd say the solution is fairly simple. If you're late returning by more than, say, 3 hours (to allow for unexpected contingencies), you get charged three times the base daily rate -- no discounts applied -- for the overtime. Some people don't care how what they do affects others, they just respond to financial consequences.

That's just one of the issues. With pay-later bookings, many folks will no-show on their reservations. Then there are delayed/canceled flights, people picking up earlier than planned, people dropping off later than planned (for a whole host of issues), unexpected returns at a different location, vehicles that get into an accident or have a mechanical breakdown, people upgrading (or downgrading), poor inventory management at the local level, vehicle deliveries arriving later than planned, or not at all, etc, etc.

It's important to keep in mind that when you make a reservation, they don't "put aside a vehicle for you". That's not how it works, and it goes back to the classic Seinfeld car rental skit. The rental companies have a basic idea of how many vehicles of each class they need on-hand to service that particular day's pickups, but things can go awry--especially these days when inventory is so tight due to the shortage of new vehicles brought on by Covid-induced supply chain issues.

PHXflier Are you not a Dollar frequent renter?
Just curious.
I have had long waits with Dollar as a frequent renter, but only as a local renter.

@dliesse
As Autoslash notes - car rental companies have traditionally not limited reservations to cars available. That wasn't an issue when the car rental companies always had more capacity than business - but became a problem with inventory slashing during early COVID.
I rent from Hertz frequently enough that I know all the people in the 3 locations I rent from; they will actually tell me when the next rental is because they know I tend to be very flexible in returning. From this, I have learned that not only do the car rental companies overbook, but they will also book for specific vehicles with 1 to 2 hour turnaround windows. For example, I rented a Sprinter van to move a bunch of boxes from storage to my place. It was a 10 am to 3 pm rental. The Hertz guys told me that they had a customer for that van at 4 pm and asked me to return early - which was no problem because I was literally just doing a single trip from storage. But if I were delayed, or needed longer - that customer would have been in trouble especially since that Hertz locations close at 5pm.

Not just supply chain issues, but whole car categories shrinking. A lot of economy cars were recently discontinued, and the Spark will come August join them. So that essentially forces rental companies to upgrade economy car bookings into larger categories, which pushes those reservations higher, etc. until max capacity is reached.

No, not with Dollar

Against NYC law not to have car available. Not sure what the penalty is.

https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-02193

It's handy that NYC has a form that you can fill out to make a complaint. What's unclear though is what happens once you initiate the complaint. Ostensibly, any action taken on such a complaint will not happen quickly enough to help with the immediate issue. We'd be curious to hear feedback from anyone who was denied a vehicle and ended up filling out the form.