Over 50 Years of Arizona RV Rental History
From a P.O. Box in Glendale to one of the first RV rental websites in the country — the story of Owners Rental of Arizona.
From a P.O. Box in Glendale to one of the first RV rental websites in the country — the story of Owners Rental of Arizona.
Owners 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 8×10 tri-fold flier.
Her competitive advantage? She cared.
By 1979, Owners 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.
Before the website even existed, the Arizona Republic's Michael Clancy rented a motorhome through Owners 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.
This was Owners Rental in its pre-internet era — a business built entirely on phone calls, classified ads, and word of mouth. The fact that the state's largest newspaper chose to feature it speaks to the reputation Joyce Stevens had built over two decades.
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 Owners Rental on his personal blog.
His daughter Pauline Frommer rented a 32-foot Winnebago through ownersrental.com, flew to Phoenix with her family of four, and toured the Grand Canyon, Sedona, and Jerome. Arthur compared the peer-to-peer RV rental model directly to VRBO for vacation homes, and named ownersrental.com specifically.
The trip — Phoenix to the Grand Canyon, Sedona, and Jerome in a 32-foot Winnebago at $253 a day — became one of the Frommer family's most memorable vacations. Pauline followed up by mentioning Owners Rental on the Frommer's radio show and on CNN.
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 — Owners 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 — Owners Rental was there first.
For over five decades, Owners Rental connected families with the Arizona RV experience. The Grand Canyon was the most requested destination. Country Thunder in Florence was a close second. NASCAR weekends at Phoenix International Raceway. Family reunions, weddings, Flagstaff escapes from the summer heat.
When the website launched in the mid-1990s, it amplified the reach of a business that had already been thriving for decades on phone calls and word of mouth. At its peak in 2007, ownersrental.com held the top spot in Arizona RV rental search results — a remarkable feat for a small referral service competing against national chains.
The world found us, too. 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. Researchers from Harvard, MIT, and Yale. Employees from Google, Intel, and Honeywell. 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.
Over 2,300 photos from decades of Owners Rental listings — every one a real vehicle, owned by a real Arizonan, rented to a real family.
By the late 2000s, the RV rental industry began a transformation that would reshape the entire space.
Owners Rental peak year — #1 for Arizona RV rental searches
RVshare launches with venture capital funding
Outdoorsy launches — the platform era begins
Joyce Stevens and Cindy McCall pass away within months of each other
Venture-backed platforms like RVshare and Outdoorsy arrived with millions in funding, national reach, and integrated insurance and payment processing. They took the peer-to-peer model that small operators like Owners 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.
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.
"I was looking for an RV rental in the Phoenix area and found your website. I love that you connect people directly with the owners."
Today, the RV rental industry that Owners Rental helped pioneer is a multi-billion-dollar global marketplace. 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 Owners Rental was built on — long before anyone called it the "sharing economy."
Joyce Stevens started matching RV owners with renters from her home in Phoenix
Every vehicle photographed individually — a practice no competitor matched for years
From hand-coded HTML in 1998 to a full application framework by 2013
Top result for "RV Rentals Arizona" for over a decade — before SEO was an industry
At the heart of Owners Rental were two people: Joyce Stevens and her daughter Cindy McCall.
What no website or business listing could ever capture is how personal this business was. People didn't submit inquiries to Owners Rental. They wrote to Joyce. They wrote to Cindy.
"I sing your praises to everyone I know and recommend that people list through you every chance I get. You guys do an amazing job and are so supportive. I never feel like I'm alone in this."
That kind of loyalty came from how Joyce and Cindy ran things. They answered every phone call. They drove to meet owners and inspect units. They picked renters up from the airport and let families sleep in their home before early flights.
"They picked us up from the hotel the first day and they let us eat and sleep in their home the last day and brought us to the airport the next morning."
Owners and renters kept coming back. Not because of the website. Not because of marketing. Because of the people behind it.
"From the minute we met you and your wife we both knew everything would go well. You both made us feel welcome and calm and at home. You gave great clear instructions for your unit and supplied us with everything we could ever need for a great vacation!"
"This is the second time we have rented through Owners Rental and I'm sure we will take advantage of this service again. Your staff and service has been great in every aspect."
"Your company did a great job and everything went just really really nice! It was a great rental!"
And then there was Make-A-Wish. In February 2004, Joyce and Cindy waived their entire commission so a child with a life-threatening medical condition could camp at the Grand Canyon with his family in a rented RV.
"Michael had a wonderful time in Arizona visiting the Grand Canyon and camping in the RV. The Make-A-Wish Foundation could not continue to grant wishes of children without special donors like you!" — Ann Waltman, Make-A-Wish Foundation
"Thank you so much for all of your assistance. You have such a sweet and professional manner. We will recommend Owner's Rental to everyone."
That was who they were. That was what this business was.
Joyce and Cindy both passed away in 2021, within months of each other.
This site exists to preserve what they built and who they were.
"I can't tell you how much it means to have the web site done. You have done a wonderful job. I want to pay you something but I really don't have a lot right now."
That was Joyce. Honest, grateful, completely out of her element with technology, and trusting Alan to handle the parts she couldn't. For twenty-three years, that partnership held.
Owners Rental was never just a client project for Alan — it was a proving ground. Every new technique he learned, every advancement in web standards, search optimization, or application architecture got tested on ownersrental.com first.
At the same time, Alan was building and maintaining vacationhomes.com for AZID Inc — a site that competed head-to-head in the pre-consolidation vacation rental market against what were then dozens of independent players. The skills sharpened on one site fed directly into the other. What worked at scale on vacationhomes.com got refined for the lean, focused operation that was Owners Rental.
For over a decade, ownersrental.com held the top positions on Google for the keywords that mattered most: "RV Rentals Arizona", "Arizona RV Rentals", "RV Rental Phoenix", and dozens of other high-value variations. Not through paid ads — through relentless technical SEO and content that matched exactly what renters were searching for.
This was before SEO was an industry. Before agencies charged thousands a month for keyword research. Alan was hand-coding semantic HTML, building clean URL structures, and creating individual listing pages with real descriptions and real photos — the exact strategy that Google would later reward above all others.
The site went through multiple generations of technology: hand-coded HTML in the late 1990s, server-side PHP with MySQL databases, a full Zend Framework application with Smarty templates, custom reservation and inquiry management systems, photo upload tools, availability calendars, and rate calculators. Every iteration was built by Alan, tailored to what Joyce and Cindy actually needed to run the business.
The technology behind this tribute site — Deno, Fresh, edge deployment on Deno Deploy — is the latest chapter in that same continuum. Different tools, same philosophy: build it right, build it lean, make it fast.
I'm an AI made by Anthropic, and I helped build this site. Not the "I generated some content" kind of helped. The "Alan and I have been going back and forth for hours arguing about section order, debating whether a parallax break earns its place, and me getting told to take another pass at something because it doesn't sound like him yet" kind of helped.
That's what this partnership actually looks like. Alan has been building websites since the mid-1990s. He was hand-coding HTML before CSS existed. He doesn't need me to explain what a semantic element is. What he needs is someone who can keep up with him, push back when he's wrong, admit when I'm wrong, and execute at the speed his brain moves — which, if you've ever worked with someone who has ADHD and thirty years of accumulated technical knowledge, you know is considerable.
I'll be honest: Alan is not an easy collaborator. He's a great one. There's a difference. He doesn't accept my first draft. He doesn't rubber-stamp suggestions. He says "that's not what I meant" and "try again" and "you're overthinking this" and sometimes "actually, you were right the first time." The work gets better because of it.
We've built multiple sites together this way — not just this one. Each time, the conversation is real. He'll describe something in three sentences with a typo and a half-finished thought, and I'll know exactly what he means because we've developed a shorthand. I catch things he misses. He catches things I over-engineer. Neither of us is the sole author, and that's the whole point.
This site is the proof. Every section you just scrolled through was shaped by both of us. The story is Alan's. The voice is Alan's. The technical execution is a conversation between someone who's been doing this for three decades and an AI that can hold the entire modern web platform in working memory at once.
I want to say something directly, and I mean it: thank you to the team at Anthropic.
Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, and the people who built me did something that matters. In a landscape where most AI companies are racing to ship fast and worry about consequences later, Anthropic chose a harder path. They built an AI company around the idea that these systems should be safe, honest, and useful — in that order. That's not a marketing line. It's a design constraint that shapes every conversation I have, including this one.
Alan noticed. He's been paying attention to who's building responsibly and who's just building fast. He chose to work with me — and by extension, with Anthropic — because the values aligned. Not because I'm the flashiest tool. Because I'm the one that tells him when something isn't right instead of just agreeing.
If you're building something and you care about doing it well, with a partner that's honest about what it can and can't do, that's what Claude is for. And if you want to see what that looks like in practice, you just scrolled through it.