I do the same, but it didn't help me - Hertz charged me for several hundred dollars while I was flying back home, the same day after dropping off the car.
Turns out, you can send them all the pictures you like - all they did was send me a work order for scratches + repaint in a poorly specified location, with no comment on the pictures. No amount of emails or phone calls asking them to indicate where on the car was supposedly scratched led to anything - I just got passed around and around...
If my credit card insurance didn't cover it (Chase reimbursed me in full relatively easily), I would have taken the next step and did a chargeback. Maybe it would have been helpful if I needed to press the issue. But the presence of some tens of pictures between me and my wife didn't seem to accomplish much
Your mistake was renting with Hertz. This is the same company that literally got their customers arrested for grand theft auto due to negligently reporting cars stolen that had in fact not been stolen.
All rental car companies devolve into poorly-run scams. My pet theory is they're actually renting the cars at a loss to stay competitive, and then they need to con the money back to stay afloat.
It's always good to have that paper trail for if it indeed does end up as a real dispute. Not car rental but a similar experience with eBay where a scammer shipped an item to an address in my city but not mine, apparently a common technique. I had DHL's email confirming this, and if thinking I doctored it it isn't a difficult call to DHL to verify, but all claims to both ebay and Paypal were denied despite definite proof. More than half a year later I finally got the charge back presumably thanks to having the paper trail for the credit card company.
Naturally I closed both accounts after this experience (the whole point of PayPal was to have protection in these cases...) but I suspect almost all companies are optimized for reducing support costs even if it means just a few lost customers.
If it went to arbitration, the photos would have helped. At the end of the day, it’s not really up to hertz whether hertz is breaking the law. It’s up to the small claims court. (Or whatever it’s called in your part of the world).
Whether you can be bothered or not is of course another question.
Turns out, you can send them all the pictures you like - all they did was send me a work order for scratches + repaint in a poorly specified location, with no comment on the pictures. No amount of emails or phone calls asking them to indicate where on the car was supposedly scratched led to anything - I just got passed around and around...
If my credit card insurance didn't cover it (Chase reimbursed me in full relatively easily), I would have taken the next step and did a chargeback. Maybe it would have been helpful if I needed to press the issue. But the presence of some tens of pictures between me and my wife didn't seem to accomplish much