Calculating your forehead-to-eye ratio to expedite a car rental? Sure! Anything to help trim a few minutes off the arduous process of approving paperwork.
Hertz announced today its new partnership with CLEAR, the first in the car rental-industry to introduce biometric screening as part of the check-in process.
Just how will it work? Similar to other systems seen recently in travel, such as moves by airlines Delta and JetBlue to replace IDs and boarding passes with fingerprints and facial scans and U.S. Customs and Border Protection's introduction of facial recognition for hassle-free border entry, the rental car program, called Hertz Fast Lane powered by CLEAR, will verify your identity by checking your physiological appearance ahead of time. drastically speeding up the pick-up process.
As a customer exits the rental car parking lot with their chosen car, Hertz scans her or his face and compares it to the database stored by CLEAR, a separate, membership-based system that enables fast screening through pre-clearance. CLEAR costs $179 a year, but it also works at more than 35 airports and stadiums around North America.
The flashy new face-scanning method will be a choose-your-own-rental-car-adventure for Hertz customers for now. Those concerned with the questioned accuracy and increasing overreach of technology’s ability to capture and document our every contour will be relieved to know that, for now, the biometric screening will be optional, and desk agents will still be around to assist with the classic check-in process.
The company still also runs its Gold Plus Rewards program, which pre-validates members (the old-fashioned way, without a scan) so they can pick up a car without waiting in a long queue at the reservation counter.
Hertz Fast Lane powered by CLEAR is up and running now at the Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Atlanta, and will be rolled out to more than 40 additional Hertz locations (including LAX, JFK, and SFO) in 2019.
