Hi Peter, thank you for doing this on a regular basis!
In the event of a company-sponsored EB1A with an approved I140 but with an I485 pending for less than 180 days, is it possible for the company to rescind the approval? Or does the approval belong to me even though it is company-sponsored?
If the approval can be rescinded, could I lose my priority date and my I485 as well?
That the I-140 petition is an EB1A petition (which can also be filed by an individual) doesn't change the analysis. If the employer-filed I-140 petition was approved more than 180 days ago even if the I-485 has been pending for less than 180 days, while an employer can withdraw the I-140 petition (thus requiring the employee to get a new approved I-140 petition to get a green card), the individual still would keep his or her priority date.
In my experience, Hertz has abysmal customer service. Getting a reasonable person (or in certain cases a person at all) on the phone is near impossible.
Last time I tried to cancel a reservation on the phone with them, it took almost an hour to convince the customer support that my reservation existed. During the course of this hour, they insisted several times that the reservation didn't exist. After about 20 minutes of this, I asked to speak to a manager and was flat out denied. Since their policy does not allow hanging up on a customer service call, I refused to get off the line until I was escalated to a manager, so over the next 30 minutes the support person called me several names, including "liar", "cheat", and told me to get off the phone and find something better to do.
Finally, I was escalated to the manager who managed to find my reservation and cancel it for me. Imagine my surprise a week later when I found out that my reservation had in fact not been cancelled and I had been charged hundreds of dollars regardless.
At this point I was fed up with their customer phone service, and resorted to emails instead. The same scenario played out again, and it took dozens of emails, credit card receipts, and 4 weeks of my time for them to finally refund me my money.
The whole experience was rather eye opening in an awful and surreal sort of way.
This would have been an ideal situation for you to request your cc company issue a charge back fwiw.
Edit:
Learned about charge backs here on HN, I've contacted a cc company twice to request one and in both cases the charging company promptly reached out and resolved the dispute w/o actually needing to follow through.
You’d be surprised. Most people formulate their love for chargebacks via interactions with small sketchy merchants who are unresponsive or obstinate. In those cases the CC companies are always on your side.
That rule doesn’t apply to giant sophisticated companies that process a lot of transactions and have detailed rules, lengthy contracts or fare fules and so on like airlines or car rental companies. The CC companies are going to give them the benefit of the doubt in a different way.
My experience agrees. I had a bad rental from Hertz, and American Express rejected my chargeback three times.
The evidence Hertz provided was literally a letter that just said they provided services for 5 days, even though they provided me with a detective vehicle and charged me for 10 days.
I understand the point of contention on how much I should pay for a broken car, but I don't understand why American Express can't check that the time period is wrong. In the end, Hertz at least refunded the overcharged number of days because it was so easy to convince anyone paying attention that it was wrong ...
I noticed as much, one was with Dish Networks and I made sure to cite specific relevant contract clauses, provided documentation like "on date A at time B I spoke with rep C who provided employee id number D and said E providing confirmation number F...", then the Dish rep still tried to barter down the charges until I stated "I do not think we can reach a resolution and plan to deal with the cc company directly to proceed" for a reversal to be processed. This was ~$500, I'm sure it gets much worse.
> In my experience, Hertz has abysmal customer service. Getting a reasonable person (or in certain cases a person at all) on the phone is near impossible.
They absolutely do. I had to rent a car, last minute (like very very last minute), and went to Hertz (I usually use Enterprise). I booked online and Uber'ed to the rental place. They had billed my (business) card for a prepaid rental...
... and then wouldn't rent the car because I "failed" their ID / etc verification, "most likely because my ID profile wasn't tied to my card" (it's a business card, this doesn't seem like anything uncommon).
And then wanted to refuse my refund because it was prepaid.
So I ask for a car, pay for it, go to get it, you won't give it to me, and then you won't give my money back to me?
This is actually very common with all rental companies. They consider "failure to pass id/credit checks" is somehow the customers fault, and therefore the customer should pay up, just as if they hadn't showed up for a reservation.
That sounds pretty ridiculous, thank you for sharing the info about not hanging up on customers. I hope to never need it, but part of me worries that with enough bad luck, any customer support call can turn into this.
Similar experience with Sixt here, I'll never use them again and I use every opportunity available to steer potential customers away from them. Avoid Sixt like the plague.
>Finally, I was escalated to the manager who managed to find my reservation and cancel it for me. Imagine my surprise a week later when I found out that my reservation had in fact not been cancelled and I had been charged hundreds of dollars regardless.
What if that manager wasn't actually a manager, but just a colleague of the first person? That person told you you that he found and cancelled your reservation just for you to get off the line.
She was able to repeat back details of the reservation that I had not given them, so she had definitely found the reservation. This made the discovery of charges to my card even more frustrating later on.
It took my assistant two weeks of daily phone calls to the Hertz management at Boston Logan to get them to refund me $250 for an erroneous charge for lost keys.
I've actually had fairly good experiences calling Heartz on the phone. Did you pay for the reservation ahead of time? If you didn't, then there's no need to cancel it. If you don't pick up the car your credit card doesn't get charged (at least with Hertz). I usually call and tell them I'm canceling the reservation out of courtesy, but even if you forget, if you don't pick up your car, the reservation is invalidated. I also once showed up 4 or 5 hours late at Hertz, and they told me they'd cancelled my reservation since I didn't show up. I think they said they only hold it for an hour from the reservation time. I believe Hertz also lets you cancel your reservation online if it's more than 24 hours in the future. So you'd only need to call if it's <24 hours in the future.
In the event of a company-sponsored EB1A with an approved I140 but with an I485 pending for less than 180 days, is it possible for the company to rescind the approval? Or does the approval belong to me even though it is company-sponsored?
If the approval can be rescinded, could I lose my priority date and my I485 as well?