Hertz has repeatedly earned itself negative publicity over the past couple of years. Unfortunately, they are at it again. After previously reducing the expiration timeline for points from needing activity once every 18 months to once every 12 months, Miles Talk reports on a new restriction that came from Hertz via email today: now points expire 5 years after they are earned, regardless of activity. That’s a huge bummer that is no doubt tough to track and designed to create even more breakage in a system that’s already of marginal value at best.
Here’s the text from the email that Hertz sent to members today regarding an “important change” to the Hertz program:
Effective December 31, 2024, points will expire after 5 years from when they were earned, regardless of rental activity.* This means that any points that have been in your account for 5 years or longer will expire and be removed from your account. But don’t worry! You’ll have up to 6 months to use those points to book free rental days through 2025. And you can transfer points to an immediate family member who is also a Gold member.**
I found the wording to be a bit confusing there. My read of it is that your points will expire 5 years from when they were earned, but you’ll have up to 6 months to use the points (beyond the 5-year expiration I think?) for rental days through 2025. I think this means that you’ll temporarily have 5.5 years from the date they were earned in order to use the points until 2025 and then it’ll drop to 5 years from the date earned.
There are numerous problems with a policy like this of course. First of all, if you rent even semi-regularly, you’ll have lots of points in your account with differing expiration dates. It’ll be awfully onerous to figure out which points expire when.
There’s also the fact that this is really disappointing for anyone who has been loyal to Hertz intending to use their points on a big “someday” trip. If you have points that you’ve been actively accumulating for more than 5 years, you’d better plan that “someday” trip by the end of 2025 or else you’ll start losing what you’ve accumulated.
I hate to see a loyalty program move in this direction because it takes away the promise of future value for your loyalty and replaces it with the ability to get value so long as you constantly earn and burn, whether or not that makes sense from a value standpoint.
Ultimately, a change like this is designed to create breakage so that customers will have points expire and perhaps not even notice them evaporating little by little each month.
The moral of the story is that if you have earned a lot of Hertz points, look for opportunities to use them sooner rather than later.
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