Hertz rental upgrade at airport: bring cash

[DandyDon]

HOLY CRAP I never thought of it that way! Gosh this sure is complicated!

You should have got the upgrade for free for showing your Hertz 5-star card. If not, then complain to Hertz.

 

[PeterNBiddle]

My first thought was that the rental agent put the money in their pocket and it came off like you were bragging that you bribed the agent. We can chalk that up to the conversational disabilities of the internet if that was not your intent.

I was taking credit for having figured out a way to make my family happier with a nicer car and sharing that information with the hope that others would find that information useful for the same purpose. I never thought of it as bribing. If a cop and a pastor were both at the counter while I was there I would have done exactly the same things.

I've learned one important lesson here: SB is nearly as autistic as I am. Be extremely clear from now on.

---------- Post added at 05:02 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:58 PM ----------

You should have got the upgrade for free for showing your Hertz 5-star card. If not, then complain to Hertz.

Funnily enough, after I rented this time around Hertz sent me an email telling me that I'd need to register in the foreign country of destination to get Gold benefits service there, but when I went to do that I discovered that Mexico isn't covered.

 

[Mike]

We've established that the cash-for-upgrade scenario could be fraudulent. However it might also not be. I have no insider knowledge either way. None of us on this thread actually KNOW what's really going on.

Here's how it could actually be true that it's supposed to work this way.

When they showed me the contract at the counter - which happened to be before we talked about an upgrade - it didn't have my Hertz gold number on it. I asked them to add it and the guy said all they can do is type in our confirmation number and hit print. He said it most likely was in the record, it just wasn't one of the fields that gets printed when they hit print and it wasn't a field they can see on the screen either. He said they can't see full records nor modify anything - its one-way. All they can do is print records.

Let's say you are Hertz. It's entirely possible (the more I think about it the more likely, based on the possibility of fraud in Mexico, it becomes) that Hertz doesn't allow ANY bi-directional access to the main system. In fact, I'm thinking that they really must not.


From a risk management perspective this actually makes a lot of sense. Unsecured privileged direct access to to many millions of dollars worth of records, including direct billing against those records, is an Extremely Dangerous Thing. Compound this risk by physically surrounding your unsecured terminal with potentially corrupt employees and officials with the world's best funded and most ruthless gangs a short boat ride away and the only reasonable answer becomes "no access at all".


But at the same time you want to run a business in Mexico renting cars to your gringo Yankee customers because you have very clear data that says that if your let your great customers rent from another company in Mexico instead of you then you might lose them forever, either to another intl brand willing to take the risks that you are too afraid to take or to small local shops around the world. Frankly the latter is worse because once people start to love local, they change not just brands but how they think about brands and then they might never come back to you or your multi-billion dollar competitors. Game over man! Game over!

BASIC ROOL OF BIDNESS ARE: ALWAZE MAKE PAYING CUZDOMER JOYFUL

In more formal economic terms, you decide that it is significantly better to assume slight downside risks of small amounts of temporally-bound unregulated liquidity in your local revenue-generating resources in exchange for allowing your local assets (aka "boots on the ground") to engage in cash-based solutions to keeping your loyal customers happy while protecting yourself from a cartel-sponsored gun-point invasion of your office at midnight (complete with the kidnapping of the franchise owners teenage daughter) providing unfettered access to literally hundreds or even billions of dollars worth of assets.

Oh and then there's the news articles you'd have to deal with.


So you decide to run the business in country, but to manage your risk you remove access to the main system.

Unfortunately you've just taken away the ability of your legitimate and enterprising locals to do in-system modifications to the rentals. Things that make customers happy. Like adding a GPS or car-seat. That's bad because of the basic rool. So now you decide to let your employees do those things out-of-system, which means "off the books".

You can't explicitly tell your people to do something that may look and smell fraudulent (that's dumb) but you also can't tell the difference, programmatically from way up high in your ivory tower, between fraudulent bribes and "making loyal customers happy" because both will require that things happen outside the rental system. Upgrades, baby seats and GPS. And asking your people on the ground to always gives those away is just dumb because then there's no incentive to limit access and car-seats, GPS and upgrades are non-infinite resources.


You might even be pretty open, down there, that not only do your people not have the combination to the safe, the safe isn't even in the country, and a couple hundred dollars of upgrade money isn't really worth anyone's time. Meanwhile, up in your ivory tower, you protect your corporate people by saying that you have local solutions in place and tell your auditors to focus on something else.


So, could things work this way? Absolutely. Do they? I think they might, but I don't really know.

They take credit cards at the Hertz counter in Cozumel.

She wanted cash. Doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out why.

I was taking credit for having figured out a way to make my family happier with a nicer car and sharing that information with the hope that others would find that information useful for the same purpose. I never thought of it as bribing. If a cop and a pastor were both at the counter while I was there I would have done exactly the same things.

This would have been a great thing to have written in post #4 of this thread. You would have only been accused of being naive.

Take another example. If your children were starving, literally, and you were absolutely penniless with no chance of getting food stamps, help from a friend or relative, etc. You don't get food to your kids, they will die. Would you steal a loaf of bread to save your children?

If the answer is no, that's kind of heartless to let the kids die. If the answer is yes, then you're a potential thief. It's just a matter of how far you'll be pushed before your sense of morality breaks down.

I read that 5 times, then I held it up to a mirror read it backwards 3 more times and my head exploded.

I refuse to answer under the reasoning that doing so may make it hard for me to continue my line of logic.

 

[Mossman]

They take credit cards at the Hertz counter in Cozumel.

She wanted cash. Doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out why.

Are you certain about that? When I've posed the question, why bother dealing with cash in Cozumel because so many vendors take credit cards, I was given all sorts of reasons why cash is preferred.

Some vendors will give cash discounts, some vendors don't like bothering to process credit cards, some vendors are worried about the risk of taking credit cards, some vendors don't like paying a percentage of their sales to the credit card company, some vendors don't like how long it takes for credit card charges to settle out. There are a litany of reasons why a vendor might ask for cash instead of credit, some legitimate, some less so.

I read that 5 times, then I held it up to a mirror read it backwards 3 more times and my head exploded.

I refuse to answer under the reasoning that doing so may make it hard for me to continue my line of logic.

Ethics are rarely as cut and dried as legal statutes and are even more subject to interpretation. Sorry to explode your head. Maybe DAN will cover that as a dive-related injury since you were on Scubaboard when it happened?

 

[vladimir]

Perhaps. As they say, don't do the crime if you can't risk the time.

Taking another example from Indonesia where morality gets a bit quirky: On my first trip to Bali, we did an island tour. As is custom, the driver took us to a woodcarving shop among others, where it's standard practice for the driver to get a cut of the merchant's sales for bringing in the customer. While driver is waiting in the car, we're settling up our purchases. Shop owner explains to me that he'll give us a great discount (say 25%) if we sign off on an invoice that only shows 50% of what we bought. It's that invoice amount that will be used to figure the driver's cut. Shop owner is screwing the driver. For all we knew, driver was screwing us by bringing us to a shop where the driver would be sure to get a cut. So is it bad to agree with shop owner on the reduced price in order to get our discount? Morally, maybe. But is it stealing?

We just went with the flow and let the shop owner manipulate the numbers. After our drive, we tipped the driver as much as it cost for the island tour in the first place, so he hopefully recouped at least more than what he would have made from an honest bad-tipping customer.

If you steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving children, I would not support pursuing you through the sewers of Paris, okay? If you are trying to get me to admit that there are shades of gray, I happily admit it, and have always believed it. But none of the scenarios you've cited are analogous to the one this thread is about. You will agree, I'm sure, that feeding starving children is not analogous to getting them softer seats and cup-holders. The ethics at the Hertz counter are clear, even though the facts of the situation are undetermined, and we could sum them up with a few if/then statements.

As for Indonesia:

If your Ubud shopkeeper has a legal agreement with your driver to share revenue, entered into freely, then you have conspired with him to defraud the driver; that is unethical. If he has been coerced into the agreement, and you have helped him circumvent it, you have acted ethically. You wouldn't be expected to know, one way or the other.

If your driver has made no false representations about his legal business relationship with the shopkeeper, he is not acting unethically by bringing you there, even if the striped wooden cats are much cheaper at other shops.

If the shopkeeper's children are living in penury, his ethics lie in providing for them, not honoring business agreements. Ditto the driver.

If you are transacting business in a country rife with corruption, extortion, and poverty, you are free to just try your best, as long as you are not actively subverting others' ethics with the false justification that "everybody is doing it".

None of this is relevant to the Hertz counter in Cozumel. The manager's children are not starving, and nobody is being coerced. It's just a simple question of whether the OP knowingly entered into a conspiracy to defraud Hertz for a petty amount of revenue or goodwill. It appears to me that he acted ethically and in good faith.

 

[lionfish-eater]

I had to work a long day today, so I missed some of the fun here. I will relate a similar experience I hada few weeks ago in coz. I searched online for a car reservation and got prices from a few different vendors. I have used one company a few times before and was happy with the car and the service. I had the cell phone number of the manager who I had dealt with before. The price online was $190.00 for the car and liability insurance for a week. I phoned the manager to say hello and let him know that I would be down shortly. I didn't mention the internet price at first, and asked him for the price for the week. The price he quoted me was $70.00 more that the online price. I then asked about the online price. He told me that they don't always have cars in stock for reservations made online, but if I agreed to the higher price through him he would make sure that there was a car waiting for me at the airport. When I asked if he could lower the price closer to the online price, he suggested that we discuss it when I arrived, but that he might be able to reduce the price if I paid part of the rental in cash. He said something about having to report a certain amount to the company and that if I were willing to pay part cash then we could work it out. I thanked him and rented a car from another company. I am not a saint by any stretch of the imagination and this may indeed be how commerce is conducted in certain areas, but I didn't feel comfortable with the arrangement.
A local coffee shop at home offers refills for 75 cents. Most people pay with a buck and leave a 25 cent tip. An employee decided to give out free refills and most people put the buck in the tip jar. The owner of the shop found out from another employee and set up a camera to collect evidence( as is required if you plan to fire them). The employee was fired and many of the customers complained because the employee was well liked. It was a clear case of an employee giving away something that belonged to the company for personal gain. They were denied unemployment insurance. I see a similarity between the two cases.

 

[PeterNBiddle]

This would have been a great thing to have written in post #4 of this thread. You would have only been accused of being naive.

Did you actually accuse me directly of anything? All I've read is innuendo.

Shouldn't you call Hertz and report this? Otherwise you're party to the crime, right? The bible has all sorts of things to say about that, doesn't it?

I refuse to answer under the reasoning that doing so may make it hard for me to continue my line of logic.

Continuing your line of logic seems to require you skip things that are inconvenient to a black and white viewpoint. I think I'll stick with tackling inconvenience head on and tolerating shades of grey.




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[nimoh]

I see. So if you forgot to lock your front door and someone walked in and stole your TV set, according to you, you would not want to be able to have that person arrested or convicted of burglary because it was up to you to police your homes security by locking the door, you didn't do it, so it's your fault he stole from you, you deserved it and he did nothing wrong.

Opportunity isn't an excuse for taking party to theft.

If an employee of a restaurant motioned you over to the cash register, did a couple of sideways glances over his shoulder to make sure nobody was looking, opened the register up and said, here take some, as he started stuffing 20s in his pocket, you'd be right there taking them out of the register with him, and your excuse would be "it is up to the business owner to police that, not me"

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It's unbelievable how full the world is with thieves.

not the same thing at all