It looks like Hertz is back on its bullshit. First, it was charging a man a smoking fee even though he hasn’t smoked in over 20 years. Now, as the L.A. Times reports, a woman is being charged a cleaning fee for someone else’s nastiness.
The woman, one Faith Cenobio from Utah, was visiting family in Georiga. On May 12th, she picked up her Toyota Corolla rental from the local Hertz. The problems with the rental started immediately. The tank wasn’t full and the car wasn’t clean:
Her rental agreement said the tank was full. It wasn’t. It was nearly empty. She pointed this out to the service rep, who made a note.
Cenobio then observed that it looked to her like the car hadn’t been vacuumed, even though it was supposedly “Gold Standard Clean,” which Hertz says “ensures you are the first inside following an enhanced 15-point cleaning process.”
As she describes it, the situation was “...either take it or you get nothing. I wasn’t in a position to argue.” This is when the situation got worse. Later that night, she and her seven-year-old niece went to get dinner. The disgusting discovery was made by her niece after they got their food.
“Five minutes up the road,” she told me, “my niece asks me about the plastic thing on the floor of the car. She didn’t know what it was.”
After they stopped, Cenobio said, she helped her niece out and took a look at what the girl had found.
“It was a condom full of semen.”
I probably would’ve swerved off the road had my son found something like that. She immediately called Hertz and spoke to a rep who was less than helpful. She says no apology was given, with the rep asking what she wanted out of the situation instead. A manager reached out and said that the car had been cleaned and then offered her a $100 credit for her next rental. The $100 credit ended up being applied to the current rental.
A few days later, right before getting on her flight, she was emailed a receipt with a $75 cleaning charge. She was being billed for the pet hair that was found in the vehicle when she picked it up. And as for the condom? It doesn’t seem to be a big deal to Hertz, with a spokesperson only saying that “our cleanliness standards were not met in this situation.”