Interestingly, I had Enterprise squarely in my head as the budget option compared to Hertz, who I always had down as the "pricey but better service" option (at least if you exercised the Gold program, etc.)
Not sure if I'm strictly a victim of effective marketing, or if they flipped places in the last however many years, or what, but it's interesting to see your post and the replies that imply I've got it backwards.
If you formed that opinion years ago it might have been more true. In the 00s Hertz was indeed a top tier, best in class, rental company.
They were sold the private equity then taken public in 2006 and the quality of the company declined dramatically over the 2010s.
They changed their model to focus on partnership programs through airlines, hotels, and credit cards while offering low teaser rates for their rentals and upselling addons afterwards.
Performance metrics for their staff shifted from customer satisfaction to sales targets.
They canceled their R&D efforts (like rental kiosks) and refocused that money on marketing campaigns.
Their marketshare and profits declined and as a result activist investor Carl Icahn put pressure on the company to cut costs in 2016, forcing in a new CEO. Those cuts ultimately led to incidents like the one in the original article about falsely reporting the vehicles stolen but also to the company's bankruptcy filing in 2019.
It's been quite the fall from grace for the company.
Man, sometimes people are so desperate to advance a point of view, they end up a million miles off base. Carl Icahn didn't "force in" a new CEO, his old CEO was a freaking criminal who signed off on fraudulent earning reports. Yes, a change was warranted. He got paid over $10 million to walk, left Hertz with another $16 million in fines, and he himself ultimately settled with the SEC for just $2 million (and landed in the CEO role at Caesars Entertainment, which filed for bankruptcy under his watch, and then paid him $29 million to "emerge"). No, if you are a criminal CEO and a cheapskate, you don't get to blame Uncle Carl for making you do it.
Not sure if I'm strictly a victim of effective marketing, or if they flipped places in the last however many years, or what, but it's interesting to see your post and the replies that imply I've got it backwards.