A traveller rented a sedan in Seattle for a single day, returned it, paid the bill, and thought nothing more of it. Then Hertz sent a second invoice: $1,367.38 for a Jeep Compass, picked up before the customer had even landed in Seattle and returned a week after they'd flown home. Three months and more than 35 phone calls later, the charge still hasn't been removed.
The most frustrating part? Hertz has already admitted the error. In an October 2 email, its customer relations team confirmed that a refund for the "duplicate rental charge" was processed on September 29. The money never showed up. When the customer disputed the charge through Chase, Hertz reportedly told the bank the rental was legitimate and no refund was owed — while telling the customer the opposite. Chase says it can't act without Hertz confirming the refund directly; Hertz blames Chase for holding the money. The customer, who supplied flight records proving they weren't in Seattle when the Jeep was supposedly collected, is now facing a credit card payment deadline on a bill for a car they never touched.
This isn't a one-off. View from the Wing has documented a string of similar Hertz billing sagas: an Austin customer billed $91.77 for a car he reserved but never picked up (complete with a fabricated 100-mile trip); a Calgary renter charged $436.50 for a red light ticket issued before their pickup, thanks to an AM/PM error in Hertz's system — the company removed the extra rental day but kept the ticket charge; a $277.39 refuelling fee on a Tesla, which is an electric car; $920 in tolls the renter said came from a transponder used in another vehicle; and a threatened $10,000 mileage bill on an unlimited-mileage rental. Hertz's pattern, the reporting suggests, is to defend whatever its records say, even when customers produce evidence those records are wrong.
There's history here. Hertz's faulty recordkeeping once led to customers being wrongly arrested over cars they had legitimately rented or returned, resulting in a $168 million settlement covering 364 claims in 2022. The company later partnered with Palantir to improve fleet tracking, and the false-arrest problem appeared to ease. Billing errors, however, clearly haven't gone away.
Why should holidaymakers care? Because rental disputes can snowball fast, and even a paper trail may not save you. If you rent a car, photograph the odometer and the vehicle at pickup and return, keep your receipts and boarding passes, pay with a credit card that offers dispute protection, and check your statement in the weeks afterwards. If a mystery charge appears, dispute it in writing immediately and keep every email — the customer in this case at least has Hertz's own written admission, which may ultimately be what wins. The broader lesson: the biggest names aren't immune to recordkeeping messes, so treat your rental receipt as the start of the paperwork, not the end of it.
View from the Wing
