Road Shelf

Marcus Penland

Behind Road Shelf

About

Marcus Penland is 43 and works as a regional B2B sales rep covering Mountain West and Southwest accounts out of a house in Cottonwood Heights, just outside Salt Lake City. For years the corporate travel desk handled every car rental. Late 2023, the company changed the expense policy and he had to start self-booking. The first self-booked trip was a four-day PHX run. He found a forty-dollar price gap between an aggregator quote and the Hertz direct rate for the same car, same dates. His corporate travel desk had apparently been booking above-market for a while.

That discovery kicked off a spreadsheet habit. Since then he logs every rental: aggregator versus direct price, what actually showed up at the counter versus what the booking confirmation showed, upsell attempts and how he handled them, and shuttle wait times when he tested off-airport pickup. He flies out of SLC most weeks, usually into PHX, LAS, DEN, or DFW. The family does a spring break national parks self-drive every year, Bryce Canyon to Arches, which covers the leisure side of the same market. His wife runs a small bookkeeping firm. Their two kids are 14 and 16.

Marcus is not a travel agent, a chauffeur, or a corporate mobility consultant. He is a sales rep who has seen the inside of too many rental counters and started writing things down. The site started, more or less, because his wife asked why he kept yelling at the Hertz counter.

Recent posts by Marcus Penland

Disclosure

Links to car rental aggregators and airport-transport services on this site 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. Full disclosure policy on the editorial policy page.