Owner's Rental of Arizona began in the late 1960s as something beautifully simple: a referral service connecting people who owned recreational vehicles with people who wanted to rent them.
Long before apps, platforms, or online marketplaces existed, there was a phone number, a P.O. Box in Glendale, and a woman named Joyce Stevens who made it all work. She ran the business for decades with the kind of personal attention that no algorithm can replicate.
In the mid-1990s, Owner's Rental went online — becoming one of the first peer-to-peer RV rental websites in the country. The earliest archived snapshot, captured by the Wayback Machine on December 1, 1998, confirms the site was already live and functioning. No other P2P RV rental website from that era has been found in the internet archives.
A Business Built on Trust
For the better part of a decade, if you searched for "Arizona RV rentals" or anything like it, Owner's Rental was at the top. Tens of thousands of families found the site — looking for Grand Canyon trips, Country Thunder festivals, NASCAR weekends, family reunions, and more.
Inquiries came from over 40 countries. A BBC producer in London planned an Arizona RV holiday. NASA needed a trailer for the Army Proving Grounds in Yuma. A Navy sailor wrote from the USS Peleliu. Employees from Google, Intel, and Honeywell. Arizona's own government agencies. All of them found a small referral service run from a P.O. Box in Glendale.
Endorsed by Arthur Frommer
In March 2009, Arthur Frommer — founder of the Frommer's travel guide empire — wrote about Owner's Rental after his daughter Pauline rented a 32-foot Winnebago through ownersrental.com for a family trip through the Grand Canyon, Sedona, and Jerome.
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Remembering Joyce and Cindy
At the heart of Owner's Rental were Joyce Stevens and her daughter Cindy McCall. They both passed away in 2021, within months of each other. The personal attention they brought to every phone call, every rental, every relationship — that was the real business.
This website and the legacy of Owner's Rental are maintained by Alan T Miller / Online Brands LLC — the same person Joyce called in the 1990s to help her get online.