What it is
The Arizona Grand is a 744-suite resort on the south side of the Baseline Road and I-10 interchange, backed against the north slope of South Mountain Park, and it owns the one thing no Scottsdale resort does: a proper water park. The Oasis covers seven acres of the grounds with an eight-story slide tower, a wave pool, a tubing river built for two abreast, a splash area for small children and a hot tub that seats 25. There is a golf course, a spa, a fitness club and 120,000 square feet of meeting space around it, which tells you the other half of the business model, but the water is why you are reading this.
It opened in 1986 as the Pointe South Mountain Resort, the third of the Pointe resorts that defined Phoenix hospitality in that decade, and became the Arizona Grand in 2007 when the developer Sam Grossman bought it and spent heavily on the suites and the park.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Scottsdale’s resort pools, good as they are, top out at a waterslide or two and a lazy river; our resort pools note has the rankings. The Oasis is a different category: real slides with fifty-foot drops, a wave pool with swells, and a river you can ride side by side with a seven-year-old. The only comparable thing on the Scottsdale side is Great Wolf Lodge, which is indoors and built for a younger child. For a family with a range of ages in the hot months, this is the better weekend.
The practical version
About half an hour from Old Town by freeway. The park is for guests; non-guests get in only on select dates through ResortPass, and there is no gate to walk up to. The slides require a 48-inch rider. The Oasis is closed from December 23 to January 3 and runs a seasonal schedule the rest of the year, which the resort publishes; the other pools are open daily, 6 AM to 10 PM. The suites are residential in layout, with separate bedrooms, which matters more than the thread count when the plan is two days of chlorine.
When to go
Late May through September is the point of the place. The park is open, the suites are at their cheapest, and the water is the only sane place to be from eleven to four. Our summer playbook has the Arizona Grand down as the one off-Scottsdale resort worth a summer night with children, and that is the right role for it. March and April are pleasant for the pools and brutal on the rates; spring training and spring break fill the suites. Winter is for conferences and golf; the Oasis is closed over the holidays and mostly idle until the weather turns.
How to do the Oasis
- Slides first, before ten. Free Fall and Roadrunner both drop about fifty feet from the fourth level of the tower in a straight shot; Sidewinder is the longer, gentler 300-foot ride. Lines build after eleven.
- The wave pool. Zero-entry, one to five feet deep, two-foot swells on a cycle. Small children stay on the beach end and are fine.
- The Zuni River. The resort’s own claim is that it is the only side-by-side tubing river in the Valley, and having floated it, we have not found another. Take two tubes and a child.
- Wild Cat Springs for the under-sixes: a heated shallow pool under three arching jets and a spray deck.
- Caliente Springs at the end, the 25-person hot tub.
With kids
This is the resort to bring them to. Three ages work at once: the splash deck for a toddler, the river and wave pool for a child under 48 inches, the slides for everyone taller. Our Scottsdale with kids note pairs it with a drive to Dobbins Lookout in South Mountain Park at sunset, which starts five minutes from the lobby and costs nothing.
The neighborhood
There isn’t one. The resort sits in a freeway interchange with the mountain behind it and Ahwatukee on the other side of the ridge. Eat at the resort or drive: the New Mexican heat at Los Dos Molinos on Central Avenue is ten minutes west.
The story
Phoenix in the 1980s built resorts the way it built subdivisions, fast and in stucco, and the Pointe resorts were the local brand: the Pointe at Squaw Peak, the Pointe at Tapatio Cliffs, and in 1986 the Pointe South Mountain, each a village of red-tile suites on a mountainside with a Spanish name on the restaurant. The South Mountain property had the most land and the least slope, which is why it got the golf course and, in the early 2000s, the water park: a $12 million bet that a resort at a freeway exit could sell Phoenix families a summer vacation they did not have to leave town for. Phoenix New Times called the Oasis the best resort pool in the Valley within two years of its opening, and the bet paid.
In 2007 Sam Grossman, a Phoenix developer, bought the resort for a price reported at $206 million and renamed it the Arizona Grand, saying plainly that the Pointe name had been confusing people since the other two Pointes became Hiltons. A remodel reported at $52 million followed in 2008 and gave the Oasis the eight-story tower and the three slides you ride today. The resort has traded on the same formula since: suites for families, meeting space for conventions, and the park as the thing nobody else has.
The Scottsdale connection
The Pointe resorts were Phoenix’s answer to Scottsdale’s resort row, aimed at a family market the Camelback corridor was too grand to want. Scottsdale’s own version of the family-resort idea came later and smaller, and when it finally built a water park it built it indoors, at Great Wolf Lodge on the Salt River Community in 2019. The two resorts divide the market neatly: Great Wolf for the under-tens, the Arizona Grand for everyone who can see over a 48-inch bar. Scottsdale families have been driving down Baseline Road for the Oasis for twenty years and will tell you so if you ask.
Getting there
Loop 101 south to the 202, the 202 west, then I-10 east toward Tucson and exit at Baseline Road; the resort entrance is on Arizona Grand Parkway at the interchange. Half an hour from Old Town, thirty-five from the Camelback corridor. The airport is fifteen minutes north, which makes this a reasonable last night before a morning flight, and the gate to South Mountain Park is ten minutes west on Baseline and Central.