Fine Print Friday is a weekly column where I examine and analyze Contracts that affect many of us in our daily lives. These are typically contracts we are bound to sign if we want a product or service, and we have no choice in the contract’s terms. Each Fine Print Friday post will point out a few interesting provisions the average reader may not have noticed.
**Please Note: Fine Print Friday is not legal advice. If you need legal advice about a contract you have signed that happens to appear in Fine Print Friday, please consult an attorney. If you live in Minnesota, please contact me and I will be happy to discuss your situation.**
Renting a car is a pretty commonplace event in our country, and as with most other transactions, it requires the signing of an absurdly long contract prior to driving off the lot. Car rental also has a large number of additional terms, restrictions, and limitations of liability, many of which most of us probably never know about.
For this Fine Print Friday, then, I am going to go through the Hertz Rent-a-Car Contract. Hertz actually has a number of different parts of their overall agreement, which you can access via a drop-down menu here.
But no more preliminaries; here is what you probably don’t know you are agreeing to when you reserve a car with Hertz.
1. Red Flag: Hertz is a corporation that licenses independent business owners to run its rental locations. They suggest right up front that the rules in their Agreement may not apply to independent location owners, and that any advice you get from one of those locations will supersede the Agreement. In other words, the Agreement is what you sign and they can hold you to it, but they can change the rules later and you still have to follow them.
2. Frequent Flyer Surcharge: Hertz adds in a surcharge of up to $1.00 per day (with a maximum of $5.25 per rental), to help cover their costs of participating in frequent flyer programs.
3. Age Requirement and Fees: Rentals will cost an extra $15 or $25 per day (depending on type of car) for drivers who are between the ages of 21 and 24. This also applies to additional authorized drivers of that age group.
4. Return of the Car: You have 29 minutes past the time by which your car is to be returned before you begin getting charged for additional hours or days, depending on the type of service. Those additional charges are charged at the 30-minute mark, not after 30 minutes.
5. Liability Insurance: The renter’s liability insurance is the primary form of insurance used in case of an accident or injury. Hertz automatically provides secondary liability insurance, although the details on this coverage are not laid out.
6. Damage to the Vehicle: If the vehicle is lost or any damage occurs to the vehicle (including loss or damage due to theft), the renter is responsible for the full value of the car at the time of rental. Hertz will reduce that amount by the salvage value, but will also add on fees for towing, storage impound, administration, and the loss of use of the vehicle. You can purchase a waiver to eliminate this personal liability.
7. Reservations: A Reservation is considered “the desire and intention to rent a vehicle” at a certain time and place, not a guarantee of availability. You cannot specify the car you want, only the class of car. The Agreement does not address what will happen if no car is available to you at your scheduled pick-up time, although I expect a scene similar to that in Seinfeld will ensue.
8. Refunds: For prepaid reservations, you can receive a complete refund from the time you make the reservation up until the scheduled pick-up time for the car.
9. Emergencies: If it is “impracticable” for a renter to fulfill his or her obligations for a car reservation, Hertz will cancel the reservation and refund any charges paid. However, the impracticable circumstances to which this applies fall much more along the lines of national emergencies or Acts of God, and not personal crises. Hertz specifically disclaims health problems as being a reason to refund money paid for a car rental.
And that’s about it! It wasn’t nearly as underhanded a contract as I thought it would be, and Hertz actually seems like a pretty fair company with regard to its expectations for its customers. There are some good things to be aware of with charges and insurance, and I wish they had laid out what their secondary liability insurance consists of, but overall the contract did not strike me as particularly unfair.
So we come to the end of another Fine Print Friday. As usual, please send me suggestions for future contracts to examine.
About Graham Martin
Graham Martin is a solo practitioner focusing on Contract law (including drafting, review, and litigation). He operates Martin Legal Services, LLC in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.
{ 1 trackback }