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 Cottonwood Heights, just outside Salt Lake City. For years the corporate travel desk handled every car rental. Late 2023, the expense policy changed and he had to start self-booking and self-expensing.

The first self-booked trip was a four-day run into Phoenix. He pulled up an aggregator quote, then checked the direct counter rate for the same car, same dates, same pickup window. Forty-dollar gap. His corporate travel desk had apparently been booking above-market for as long as he could remember, and he had never thought to check. That was the start of a spreadsheet habit he has not quit since.

Three years in, he logs every rental: aggregator versus direct price, what actually showed up at the counter versus what the confirmation showed, upsell attempts and how he handled them, shuttle wait times whenever he tested an off-airport location. He flies out of SLC most weeks, usually into PHX, LAS, DEN, or DFW. His wife runs a small bookkeeping firm. Their two kids are 14 and 16. The family does a spring break national parks self-drive every year (Bryce Canyon through Arches), which rounds out the personal-travel side of the site.

He 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.