Hertz car hire - no availability at Christmas?

BlueC

Weird one this. I was looking to book a rental car for Christmas and Hertz have been offering a Focus for £122 for the week 22/12 to 29/12 - I saw this just yesterday on their website. Go online to book it today and Hertz suddenly have no cars available anywhere in the country for the entire Christmas period. Nothing, nada, zip.

What gives? Do they just close up over Christmas? Tried calling my local branch and they weren't interested... just said they have no cars. Yet they had full availability just yesterday...? Does anyone know what their policy is here?

colino

Their policy is to make money and if they have nothing to rent you they mean it! Ironically with the bad weather their utilisation goes up, not because more people are travelling over the holidays, just more people don't want to break their own cars on snow and ice.
Only real difference with "holiday rentals" is that they are less inclined to give a free upgrade if they don't have the class you wanted to book.

BlueC

colino wrote: »

Their policy is to make money and if they have nothing to rent you they mean it!

I don't buy that at all. Yesterday they had 100% availability... could pay and reserve online and had every class of car available. Today they have nothing, anywhere.

Its a weird one. And I don't agree with your observation about utilisation going up or at least certainly not to the extent that their entire fleet is booked up. Other rental companies have loads of availability - even more so than usual as there are no business hires over Christmas.

I guess Hertz must reduce their fleet or number of reservations over Christmas for some reason and just wondered if anyone could shed some light as to why? Do they use it as an opportunity to service their fleet, or do they just shut up shop?

Anyway they clearly don't want my money so I made a reservation with Enterprise instead.

anotherbaldrick

I think what this means is that you left it too late to book !

Lum

I don't know about Hertz's website specifically but the availability of a car is probably done the same way that availability of stock is on shopping websites.

It's actually really hard to do real-time stock levels on sites and even major retailers don't do it properly. It's either wildly inaccurate or it's updated once a day in batches. Maplin are a good example of the latter.

If Hertz are doing the latter then chances are that the staff at each branch got in at 9, started going through all the orders they took and processing them, causing the website to update.

Since this weekend is the first time we actually saw any snow, chances are a lot of people have suddenly decided to book hire cars!

anotherbaldrick

I think your problem is that just this morning Monday at about 11.35 am there was a program on radio 4 which was about some scam car hire companies operating who have no cars but just take your deposit money and vanish. The interviewer said only deal with mainline companies and be quick because nearly all ther cars are booked out.
I guess that at 11.40 everbody thinking of renting hit the web and hoovered up all availability.

poppasmurf_bewdley

The American's have a saying - It hurts to hire from Hertz!

photome

Have you checked the website again, it could have been a glitch

dzug1

Lum wrote: »

I don't know about Hertz's website specifically but the availability of a car is probably done the same way that availability of stock is on shopping websites.

It's actually really hard to do real-time stock levels on sites and even major retailers don't do it properly. It's either wildly inaccurate or it's updated once a day in batches. Maplin are a good example of the latter.

If Hertz are doing the latter then chances are that the staff at each branch got in at 9, started going through all the orders they took and processing them, causing the website to update.

Since this weekend is the first time we actually saw any snow, chances are a lot of people have suddenly decided to book hire cars!

mm yes - there was also an article in the Guardian on Saturday about a 'new' car hire agency offering cheap cars for the holiday. It was very carefully worded not to actually say 'don't trust this company' but the implication was there if you cared to make it.

So another reason for a surge of bookings elsewhere

anotherbaldrick

dzug1 wrote: »

mm yes - there was also an article in the Guardian on Saturday about a 'new' car hire agency offering cheap cars for the holiday. It was very carefully worded not to actually say 'don't trust this company' but the implication was there if you cared to make it.

So another reason for a surge of bookings elsewhere

Must be related to what I posted three posts above this