by Denise Calaman

Created on: September 08, 2008   Last Updated: September 04, 2009

Until this past summer my husband and I had never rented a car through Hertz. However; this past summer we found ourselves in desperate need of a rental car while we were on vacation visiting our family in New England. We relied on Hertz and I am glad that we did! Hertz got us out of a big jam, with professionalism, courtesy and without breaking our bank.

My husband and I hadn't been back to Maine in five years to visit my family and our young sons had never been there. So we figured that after five years of putting it off we were going to spend the summer in New England. We got a great deal on one way airline tickets flying into Manchester, New Hampshire. We planned to drive home because we had vouchers to use at Avis that would cover the cost of our rental almost in full. My husband also gets a corporate discount at Avis and that discount would have paid for the remaining cost of the car. We clearly went over our rental plans with a customer service specialist at Avis when we scheduled our trip well in advance. We thought everything was set. Unfortunately the day before we were scheduled to drive home we realized that the reservation specialist at Avis reserved a car at the wrong rental location and it was three hours north in the opposite direction of home. That would add six hours onto our drive home. In trying to get our sticky situation resolved, Avis, as well as other car rental companies were very unaccommodating. All except for Hertz.

Most other car rental agencies made it very difficult for us to find a car for the drive home. Our first difficulty in getting a new reservation was that we were leaving on a Sunday. I didn't know this at the time but most rental companies are closed on Sundays except for airport locations. I'm not sure why this is because lots of people travel on Sundays especially when they are returning from vacations. Because only airport locations are open on Sundays that really limited us the amount of cars available. Another difficulty was trying to find a company that rented one way. For whatever reason car rental companies don't like to rent one way. And to try and get a mini van to rent one way is impossible with some companies. They simply don't do it. Most rental companies will rent one way, if you aren't looking for a van. But at this point, even trying to rent a compact car one way was impossible. Sunday happened to be the last day of a long holiday weekend so inventories were short.

Twenty four hours before we were scheduled

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