Today we have a Reader Question about a popular feature of the Amex Platinum Card, namely a 4-hour grace period for Hertz car rentals when using the correct Amex Platinum CDP number.
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Some premium credit cards have more or less useful benefits and often this includes the category of rental cars.
Our reader Jerome contacted me a few weeks ago asking if Hertz has done away with their 4-hour grace period that is still clearly advertised on some American Express Platinum sites such as their International Currency Card.
Jerome mentioned to us that he had problems getting the 4 hours extra to price correctly and Hertz locally to honor it. In the end they charged him a full extra day in Amsterdam.
I decided to investigate it and to run some rental options just to see how it shows up. I also called my Amex Platinum Travel Concierge to inquire about it just as the site lays it out.
You can add the CDP number for Amex Platinum yourself when checking prices on the Hertz website.
- Amex Platinum: 211762
For a rental at Frankfurt Airport I couldn’t get it to work at all. Neither by checking manually or by calling the hotline where the agent then had to call Hertz in return. Talk about complicated. The price they returned from Amex was actually 50% higher than just booking on the Hertz website itself.
Another try for a simple full size rental at LAX actually worked very well, no extra charge when returning 4 hours later:
Now it’s clear that the T&C say “participating locations only” but so far I didn’t find and neither were Hertz of Amex able to supply a list of such locations.
Here is the tally of how Hertz would charge this 28 hour rental at LAX including all the scam charges, especially the horrible Customer Facility Charge which LAX now charges for over a decade yet they haven’t even remotely started yet to build the facility.
So for some locations it clearly works properly while others including the Frankfurt Airport one I tried apparently does not.
The Amex rep was also surprised that I had the actual CDP numbers available, mumbling something like “you shouldn’t have this code, we never give those out”. In fact there are many of Hertz own country specific sites that show the CDP publicly.
Conclusion
As so often I wish there would be a clearer communication and a detailed list of where you can actually benefit from these perks. Amex advertises their rather expensive Platinum card quite broadly but when actually pressed upon it nobody is able to provide an explanation.
For U.S. based car rentals I so far never had a problem getting the 4 hour benefit but abroad it proves to be difficult.
