The History of Owner's Rental

How It Started

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, Arizona, and a woman named Joyce Stevens who made it all work.

Joyce acquired the business in the 1970s and ran it for decades with the kind of personal attention that no algorithm can replicate. Every phone call was answered. Every renter was matched with the right RV and the right owner. Every detail was handled — from the walk-through checklist to the insurance paperwork, in partnership with MBA Insurance, one of the oldest RV rental insurance providers in the country.

Her marketing budget? An 8x10 tri-fold flier.

Her competitive advantage? She cared.

By 1979, Owner's Rental was advertising in the Arizona Republic — "motor home rentals of all sizes." By the mid-1990s, the business had served thousands of renters exploring Arizona's deserts, mountains, and national parks.

Going Online — Before Almost Everyone

In the mid-1990s, when most people were still figuring out what the internet was, Joyce Stevens made a phone call.

She called Alan T Miller — a family friend she'd known since he was a kid. Alan's father had worked with Joyce's husband in the Sheet Metal Union. Alan was studying at Arizona State University and had been building websites before most businesses even had email addresses.

Joyce told him she wanted to "do something to get online, take advantage of this Internet thing." All she could give him to work with was that tri-fold flier.

Alan built ownersrental.com from scratch.

What set the site apart was that it listed each individual RV available for rent, with photos, descriptions, and details. No other RV rental website was doing this. The few rental companies online at the time only listed vehicle classes or types — Owner's Rental was the first to show you the actual rig you'd be renting, from the actual person who owned it.

The earliest archived snapshot of the site, captured by the Wayback Machine on December 1, 1998, shows the site was already live and functioning — though it had been online well before the archive crawlers found it. No other peer-to-peer RV rental website from that era has been found in the internet archives.

Cruise America had a corporate site by 1997. El Monte RV came online in 1999. But for the model of private owners listing their own recreational vehicles for individual renters to browse and choose — the model that Outdoorsy and RVshare would later build billion-dollar companies around — Owner's Rental was there first.

The Press Takes Notice

The Arizona Republic, 1994

Before the website even existed, the Arizona Republic's Michael Clancy rented a motorhome through Owner's Rental for a family road trip. The resulting article — a full Travel section feature published on November 6, 1994 — chronicled his journey from Phoenix through Sunset Crater, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, Pipe Spring, and Zion National Park.

Arthur Frommer, 2009

In March 2009, Arthur Frommer — the founder of the Frommer's travel guide empire and one of the most recognized names in the history of travel publishing — wrote about Owner's Rental on his blog. His daughter Pauline Frommer had rented a 32-foot Winnebago through ownersrental.com, flown to Phoenix, and toured the Grand Canyon, Sedona, and Jerome with her family of four.

Arthur compared the peer-to-peer RV rental model directly to VRBO for vacation homes, and named ownersrental.com specifically as the service his family used. For a small Arizona referral service run by a woman out of Glendale, having the Frommer name behind it was extraordinary validation.

Tens of Thousands of Families

Between 1999 and 2021, tens of thousands of people found Owner's Rental through the website — families looking to rent an RV, owners looking to list one.

The peak came in 2007. For a small Arizona referral service competing against national chains, holding the top spot in search results year after year was remarkable.

The Grand Canyon was the most requested destination by far. Country Thunder in Florence was a close second. NASCAR weekends at Phoenix International Raceway. Family reunions, weddings, Flagstaff escapes from the summer heat.

The world found us, too. Inquiries came from over 40 countries — Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, Switzerland, France, and dozens more. 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. Researchers from Harvard, MIT, and Yale. Employees from Google, Intel, and Honeywell. The cities of Peoria, Tempe, and Flagstaff. Arizona's own Department of Public Safety, Attorney General's office, and Lottery commission.

All of them found a small referral service run from a P.O. Box in Glendale.

A History of the Internet, Told Through One Business

The "How did you find us?" question on the Owner's Rental website reads like a history of the internet itself.

In the early days, the pie was split a dozen ways. Yahoo and AOL NetFind were the biggest slices. The US West DEX phone directory — Arizona's Yellow Pages — sent nearly as many visitors as any search engine. Then Alta Vista, Excite, Netscape, Ask Jeeves, Web Crawler, Lycos, HotBot, and a dozen others. Google? It was seventh.

By the end, Google accounted for nearly three-quarters of all traffic. Every other search engine from that original list was dead or irrelevant — Alta Vista, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek, Lycos, Northern Light, Direct Hit, GoTo, Web Crawler. All gone.

Owner's Rental outlived them all.

The earliest website inquiries — November 1999 — came from visitors using Internet Explorer 5 on Windows 98. The last ones, from 2021, came from mobile browsers on smartphones. Twenty-two years of the internet's evolution, reflected in one small Arizona business.

The Industry Changed

By the late 2000s and into the 2010s, the RV rental industry began a transformation that would reshape the entire space.

Venture-backed platforms like RVshare (founded 2013) and Outdoorsy (founded 2015) arrived with millions in funding, national reach, and integrated insurance and payment processing. They took the peer-to-peer model that small operators like Owner's Rental had proven and scaled it into a multi-billion-dollar marketplace industry.

The irony wasn't lost on those who'd been there from the beginning.

From the peak in 2007, inquiry volume dropped steadily as national platforms captured the search traffic that had once gone to small operators. Owner's Rental continued to serve its loyal customer base in Arizona, but the landscape had changed. The personal touch that Joyce and Cindy were known for — the phone calls, the hand-matched rentals, the relationships built over decades — couldn't compete with the reach and convenience of platforms processing thousands of bookings a day.

The Legacy

Today, the RV rental industry that Owner's Rental helped pioneer is a multi-billion-dollar global marketplace. Platforms like Outdoorsy and RVshare process millions of bookings. Insurance technology companies have solved problems that operators like Joyce navigated with a phone call and a handshake.

But the core idea hasn't changed: someone owns an RV they're not using, and someone else wants to explore in one. The connection between those two people is what Owner's Rental was built on — long before anyone called it the "sharing economy."

This website is maintained by Alan T Miller — the same person Joyce called in the 1990s to help her "take advantage of this Internet thing."

For everyone who remembers Owner's Rental — whether you rented a Class A motorhome for a Grand Canyon trip, listed your fifth wheel for weekend renters, or just found us at the top of the search results year after year — thank you. Joyce and Cindy would want you to know: it was always about you.