About Road Shelf

Late 2023, my company changed the expense policy and I had to start self-booking and self-expensing every car rental. First trip under the new system was a four-day PHX run. I found a forty-dollar gap between an aggregator quote and the Hertz direct rate for the same car, same dates, same pickup window. My corporate travel desk had apparently been leaving money on the table for years. That was the start of the spreadsheet.

Road Shelf is what that spreadsheet turned into. I fly SLC into PHX, LAS, DEN, or DFW most weeks. Each rental gets logged: aggregator vs. direct price, what actually showed up at the counter, any upsell attempts, and how the shuttle situation compared to just getting the full-size. The family does a spring break national parks run every year (Bryce, Zion, Arches) where I test the same thing on a different kind of trip. Both ends of the rental market, business and personal, same spreadsheet habit.

More on Marcus Penland on the author page.

Heads up: links here to car rental aggregators and airport-transport services earn me a commission when you book through them. Your price stays the same. Every service I write about is one I have actually booked through on my own trips. If a counter ripped me off, I write that up too, regardless of whether there is a commission in it.