Report Claims Syracuse Airport Travelers Took Random Cars for Wildest Reason

An incident that happened over the summer at a Syracuse airport has finally come to light.

Nearly everyone has an airport horror story, but chances are it's not as chaotic as what happened at Syracuse's Hancock International Airport.

According to a CBS News report, employees working at the Hertz rental agency on July 20 just walked off the job and left their post unattended... for six hours!

The problem is Hertz staff abandoned ship when customers still needed their help.

So, when the roughly 20 customers showed up to pick up their rental cars, no one was there to help them.

But the story gets even wilder.

Turns out the customers were adamant that they'd get a rental one way or another, so they helped themselves to whatever cars were available.

One person who admittedly took one of the cars was Denver Mayor Mike Johnston. The politician was in the city with his son for a summer program, but he took matters into his own hands after finding the Hertz counter was closed with no employees in sight.

He said he, as well as other customers, went to the Hertz garage to look for rental cars with their keys inside and "took one we thought was for us."

There were probably 40 of us all stuck at the same rental car company, there were a bunch of folks picking up cars ... But not the right cars

Johnston said he learned the car he took wasn't the right one, so he returned it for another.

The Syracuse Regional Airport Authority opened an investigation after receiving multiple complaints.

They confirmed employees walked of the job at 7:13 at night, which is well before the counter is supposed to close an hour after the last fight of the day.

For those curious, the Hertz counter is supposed to close after 1:28 in the morning.

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It was also noted the incident happened the day after Central New York was hit by a global technology outage that disrupted flights at the airport.

While Hertz did not suffer an outage, they were a lot busier than normal and employees worked longer hours to serve an influx of customers impacted by the outage.

Jamie Line, director of external communications for Hertz, confirmed every single employee that abandoned their post no longer works for the company.

We regret the unfortunate situation that impacted several customers at our Syracuse Airport location in July. The employees on duty were immediately terminated and we resumed normal operations the next day.

Employees reopened the counter at 6:57 the following morning.

Now a new question is being asked: why are we only now hearing of this?

If you have any theories, send them directly to us using the station app's chat feature.

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