One woman’s Brooklyn Hertz holiday nightmare goes viral

By Ethan Jakob Craft

With any luck, your three-day work week (and even more coveted four-day weekend) was spent strapping on the ol’ feedbag and savoring the last vestiges of autumn weather—and not, at any point, renting a car.

If, however, you were among the unenviable Brooklynites tasked with picking up a Kia Optima (or whatever) this past weekend to visit upstate kin (or whatever), we hope you steered clear of the Hertz rent-a-car near Barclays Center. One woman’s virally hellish experience is enough to leave you thankful you stayed put.

Here’s how it happened: On Sunday, November 21, Brooklyn-based attorney and St. John’s University professor Kate Klonick arrived at the Hertz car rental outpost on Dean Street a couple of blocks behind the arena with a confirmed booking for a mid-sized sedan in hand. Total cost: $400 and change, including taxes and fees.

Arriving to pick up her rental at noon, she found a line of roughly 15 agitated customers and one (1) overworked Hertz employee, who promptly announced that she’d only be able to serve five more customers before locking the doors.

“I thought this was perhaps a misunderstanding—I had a contract! I had met its terms!” she wrote to the company, and shared online, in the days following her Thanksgiving ordeal.

Her partner placed a call to Hertz’s customer service, which informed the couple they could make a new reservation at the company’s Union Street location for a mere $1,800. But even if that was acceptable, it would’ve been too late, because by the next stage of Klonick’s saga, that car rental depot off of Grand Army Plaza had closed, too.

The rest of her Sunday evening was spent in Ubers to and from LaGuardia and piling up additional $1,800 rental quotes, punctuated by more than 20 calls to the company’s customer support line, many of which were mysteriously disconnected mid-call, before heading to the Hertz in Williamsburg the next morning to repeat the ordeal all over again.

A full account of Klonick’s zero-stars “shoddy and Kafkaesque” experience can be found in a letter she wrote to the Hertz Corporation and subsequently share online, where it found an audience.

I had a Very Bad experience with @Hertz over Thanksgiving.

This is what happened & the letter I wrote. We are totally fine, & our Thanksgiving ended up wonderful, but I suspect this is a fraudulent business practice, & I want to give it visibility for those who don’t or can’t. pic.twitter.com/cr9haMSeXd

— Kate Klonick (@Klonick) November 30, 2021

It was in that dinky subterranean office with her partner and blind, deaf, elderly rescue dog that an employee suggested that Amanda, the original lone Hertz agent on Dean Street, might’ve closed up shop because she knew they were out of cars but wanted to shift the blame to the would-be customers who were, by then, “too late” for their original reservation time.

“This happens all the time,” one of the Williamsburg employees allegedly said.

Eventually, Klonick and Co. hit the road to western New York in a $943 “mechanically faulty” hatchback (Hertz’s language for “broken back-up camera”), soon after writing to the rental car firm’s Oklahoma HQ to request about $750 in reimbursements for the sizable difference in rental rates, the Ubers all across the borough, and one “Very Nice Bottle of Champagne” she gifted to the Williamsburg office for saving her Thanksgiving.

Yesterday, she shared the lengthy letter of request on Twitter, which subsequently went viral, garnering tens of thousands of likes and a quicker response from Hertz than it seems like she received at any point during her original rental attempt(s).

“Hertz cares deeply about our customers, and we regret Ms. Klonick’s experience, which does not reflect our standards of service,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email to the Washington Post, which reported on the Brooklyn rent-a-car nightmare this morning.

“We have spoken with her to apologize and refunded the rate difference. We are investigating the situation to better understand what occurred so we can take any necessary corrective actions,” they said.

Klonick wrote on social media that a Hertz representative had called her directly the evening she posted the letter online, to apologize and promise to refund the amount she requested to her credit card. At the time of publication, not a dime has allegedly been refunded.

“Small claims court here I come,” the attorney wrote in a final Twitter thread this afternoon.

After Klonick shared the account of her weekend-before-Thanksgiving mess, other Twitter users piled on the replies to air their own grievances with Hertz, including some who’ve previously faced issued at its Dean Street location.

a very similar thing happened to us, also at the dean street location! we refuted the charge on our credit card and that ended up getting $400 of the $600 bogus “surcharge” refunded. though i still feel scammed… glad a law prof is on this! https://t.co/2NQeu0VQPM

— mystopher throbinson (@chris_ebooks) November 30, 2021

Others, however, took the story as an opportunity to simply dunk on the company—including pointing out that at the time of Klonick’s original Twitter post yesterday, Hertz stock was trading at just under $16 a share, before sliding to as low as $14.55 this afternoon and closing on the Nasdaq not much higher than that.