After dealing with things like arrests over false complaints of rental thefts and a bad EV bet that’s seen a massive sale of a bunch of cheap Teslas, Hertz has another problem on its hands, at least at one of its locations. Workers at a Hertz in Syracuse, New York, abandoned their posts, resulting in customers (including the mayor of Denver) taking the keys to whatever rental cars they wanted.
CBS News reports that over 20 travelers who arrived at the Hertz in Syracuse this summer were met with a surreal scene when they walked in: the building was totally empty, because apparently every single worker had walked out. One of those customers was Mike Johnston, the mayor of Denver, Colorado. Johnston was in New York for a summer program his son was attending. “We showed up and the rental car company was closed,” he told CBS. So rather than wait or look for someone, Johnston and other customers took matters into their own hands.
So Johnston and many other Hertz customers who had reservations just found Hertz cars with keys in them and drove away.
“So we took one we thought was for us,” said Johnston, who said he later found out the car he took was not the correct one and he exchanged it for a different one.
Documents from the Syracuse Regional Airport Authority show that people began complaining about the location to airport officials. Everyone complaining, like Johnston, had shown up because they had reservations. CBS says airport officials began looking at security cameras from the location to figure out what happened. The footage showed that all the workers left the location around 7 pm, a full “six hours before they were supposed to leave.” The airport says staff were supposed to be there until nearly 2 am.
Not long after the workers left, customers began showing up and, as Johnston described, started grabbing vehicles on their own. One complaint stated that customers were taking “random cars that had keys in them,” though not all customers were able to find a car with keys.
A week after the incident, airport officials reached out to Hertz, basically saying “Hey, you know you guys have to do business here, right?” Hertz responded as if it was talking to a customer, saying that the company had “sincere apologies for the level of service that we have provided.” CBS News in Colorado reached out to Hertz about the incident and received no response.
Hertz did provide a statement about what happened to Syracuse.com, saying that “the employees on duty were immediately terminated and we resumed normal operations the next day.” As for Denver’s Mayor Johnston, he was a good sport about the incident and even returned the car he drove off in after finding out it was the wrong vehicle. “We resolved it all. I drove it back,” he said.