Hertz is in a heap of public relations trouble once again as a location manager threatened to have a customer arrested if he didn’t pay a $10,000 mileage overage charge for driving 25,000 miles in one month. That’s a ton of miles for a car to rack up in one month, basically doing around 1,000 miles per business day. But here’s the kicker, the rental agreement was for “unlimited miles.”
In the TikTok video below, first spotted by One Mile At A Time, you can see the exchange between the Hertz manager and the unnamed customer become quite heated. Despite repeated pleas for sanity, the customer is faced with a choice of paying the $10,000 and walking out, or continuing to dispute the charge and potentially getting arrested. It isn’t clear what laws the customer was breaking that would result in their arrest, but when a so-called customer service professional becomes this belligerent there’s likely no reasoning with them.
There are obviously two sides to this story, as the customer almost certainly overran the car’s service intervals during his month with the machine. If they were ignoring “service engine soon” lights on the dash, that could certainly have caused untold damage, maybe even above the $10,000 fee. That said, it’s in Hertz’ best interest to make this PR nightmare go away as quickly as possible, so it has decided to reverse the charge and apologize to the customer.
“Customer satisfaction is our top priority at Hertz, and we sincerely regret this customer’s experience at one of our franchise locations,” Hertz’s statement, provided to the Drive, reads. “Per the terms of the contract, the customer will not be billed for mileage. Our franchisee is addressing the employee’s conduct and reinforcing our customer service standards and policies to ensure they are understood and followed consistently across our locations.”
So, I guess, if you need to do a whole lot of driving over the course of a month, you should probably rent a car so you aren’t racking up miles on your own vehicle. Maybe make sure you get the rental desk to confirm it’s unlimited in writing before you take off, though.
