The Wildly False Accusation Hertz Accused Is Customers Of
This article is more than 2 years old
The car rental giant Hertz is under fire again. In March, they accused some of their customers of stealing their rental cars. These customers were subsequently arrested as the accusation was severe. It turned out their accusation was false, and due to the severity of the claims, many customers have now sued the company.
This week, Hertz settled the legal claim against them and has agreed to pay its falsely accused customers $168 million to compensate them for such a horrible and embarrassing thing to occur.
The accused customers signed a class-action lawsuit together against the company. Within the legal documents, they claim that they were falsely arrested due to Hertz claiming that their rental car was stolen. Some of the claimant’s ordeals went on for so long that they had to hire legal counsel to represent themselves while incarcerated.
Records show that Hertz filed over 3,000 police reports annually that claim customers have stolen or damaged their cars. During the lawsuit, it was determined that almost every vehicle claimed to be stolen returned to the car rental company. It was determined that Hertz had an organizational issue within its company and couldn’t keep track of its inventory within each branch.
They claim they will hold themselves to a higher standard now that they have settled with their disgruntled customers. They stated that they would never be perfect, but they will continue to hold themselves to a high standard and learn from past discrepancies. This will give them a better future for the company and its customers.
Hertz’s new CEO was appointed in April and vowed to turn the company around. It actively investigated all these car theft claims and became open about the company’s past transgressions.
The falsely-accused customers’ legal team painted Hertz to be a company without control of their bookkeeping or company. Suppose a customer asks to extend their rental contract with the company. In that case, this results in a hold over the customer card given to the company during the processing of the original rental agreement. If the hold fails to be processed, the car is categorized within the Hertz system as “stolen by conversion.” Usually, this term is used when a customer uses property or funds and violates the terms of the contract signed by them.
While Hertz has announced that the legal claim against them is now closed, there has been no detail on how the significant money of money awarded to the customers will be split. Also, there needs to be more information given by Hertz on how other consumers could resolve any remaining conflict with the car rental giants.
It is nice to see that the small guys do win sometimes. As they grow and expand, some big companies forget that customer service and keeping them happy is still the number one priority, no matter how big a company gets. Any company without its customer base would fail immediately, and now, because of sloppy organizational skills, Hertz has lost many of them to their rivals.
