Surprise! SAS miles from Hertz rental actually posted already

Well, color me surprised. If you’ve kept up on my posts about the Hertz and SAS promotion, you’ve seen that there have been a couple of stages:

1. Amazing Deal (Maybe): 5k SAS miles per cheap Hertz rental: Let’s call this the infatuation stage. This promotion looked too good to be true, but I couldn’t resist. Hertz and SAS were offering 5k miles for every Hertz rental over the next several months. Cars were available from about $20 all-in. Could it be true? Could $410 in rentals really buy round trip business class to Europe? I wanted to book first and ask questions later. The biggest problem: the terms state that miles won’t post until after October 5th. Talk about delayed gratification and a lot of time for something to go wrong.
2. Update on 5k Mile SAS + Hertz Rental Car: The honeymoon stage. I picked up my first car of the promotion and there was good news to report: The agent at pick-up proactively mentioned that he saw I would be earning 5,000 miles with this rental. The promotion showed in the system — excellent! Things were heating up.
3. Hertz makes sneaky change to SAS promotion: And then we had it: the breakup. Somebody call an ambulance, ’cause Hertz just killed it. From the beginning, friends tried to warn me, “But……the terms say that Hertz can change the promo at any time”. And Hertz did, in fact, sneak a change into the terms. Rentals must now be a minimum of 3 days to earn the miles. This clause was not there before. Hertz changed the rules in the middle of the game. With 6 months to go before miles are scheduled to post. Not a good sign.

And so the story seemed over. Hertz changed the terms just 13 days into the promotion. Who knows what other changes they could make in the six months before miles are scheduled to post? What would this change mean for those of us who have already rented? If I were a betting man, my money would have been on an uphill battle in getting anything credited come October.

But I’d have lost

Of course, I’m glad nobody took me up on that bet. About two hours ago, I got a notification on my phone from Award Wallet. I logged into SAS to see a nice surprise:

There they are! The 5,000 miles from my first rental. I expect the miles from my second rental won’t be too far behind. I’m very happy to see that Hertz/SAS honored the promotion as it was written despite the change in terms. That’s not at all what I expected and I am pleasantly surprised. That said, it still stinks that they changed the terms so quickly into the promotion and made no effort to communicate it. It would seem that at the very least, the right thing to do would have been to email SAS members and make them aware of the change (along with the intent to honor reservations already made).

What does this mean?

It’s hard to say. At the least, I’d say it means that if you already completed a rental, you’ll probably get your miles. If you’ve already reserved a 1-day rental but haven’t picked it up yet, it’s much harder to say. Since your rental will begin after the change in terms, it’s anybody’s guess as to whether or not you’ll get the miles…..unless, of course, your rental is for 3 days or more. I had only done two rentals so far, so I’m going to need at least one more rental to get any use out of these miles. Luckily, I do have a couple of situations where I’ll need a 3-day rental, so this might work out — if not quite as well as we’d hoped going in.

If you already have a 1-day reservation that you booked before the change in terms, we’d love to know how it works out for you if you are still picking up your rental. I picked up my first rental last Thursday and returned it Friday — the miles posted tonight (the following Thursday). Let us know your results.

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