Renting a car at the airport isn’t always a perfect experience. Your rental car may not have been cleaned, you may run into hidden fees or unexpected charges or the agent may try to upsell you. But Denver Mayor Mike Johnston and dozens of other travelers ran into a different problem when they showed up to pick up their rental cars at the Syracuse, New York, airport this summer: all the employees of the Hertz rental car agency had “abandoned” their jobs, leaving Denver’s mayor and at least 20 other Hertz customers in an awkward position.
“Oh yeah,” recounted Johnston, “I took my son to a summer program there.”
But things took an unusual turn after Johnston and his son landed at the Syracuse airport and went to retrieve their rental car.
“We showed up and the rental car company was closed,” said the mayor.
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.