What it is
The Omni Tempe Hotel at ASU is the tower on the northeast corner of the Arizona State campus, where University Drive meets Mill Avenue and the university gives way to downtown Tempe. It opened on April 27, 2023, with 330 rooms including eleven suites, and it was built with the university on university land to be the thing ASU had never had: a full-service hotel at its front door for the parents, recruits, conference delegates and alumni who had been staying in Scottsdale and driving in. The ballroom is the largest in Tempe. The conference floor is extensive. None of that is why you would care.
The roof is. The pool deck sits high over the campus with cabanas, a fire pit, lounge furniture and a ping-pong table, looking south over the palms and the brick of the old campus to the buttes beyond, and beside it is Lucero, a rooftop restaurant and lounge that is the best sunset table in Tempe. Downstairs, Neighborhood Services is the lobby restaurant from breakfast through dinner, Library Rules is a coffee shop that turns into a cocktail bar at four, and Salt & Gila does lunch at the pool.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because on certain weekends Scottsdale is the wrong side of the river. A Sun Devil football Saturday, commencement in May, a Broadway opening at Gammage: on those nights the drive back up Rural Road is an hour and the Omni is a ten-minute walk from the stadium, fifteen from Gammage and one block from Mill Avenue. Our where to stay note is honest that Scottsdale is the better base for a week; this is the better bed for a Tempe event. The other reason is the roof, which needs no room key: Lucero takes dinner reservations and the lounge takes walk-ins, and a drink there at sunset is the best view in the city.
The practical version
Eighteen minutes from Old Town, no traffic: Scottsdale Road south into Rural, west on University to Mill. Valet at the door; downtown garages a block away. Ten minutes from the airport. Book game and graduation weekends as soon as the dates are public, because the whole East Valley does. The Chuckbox is across University Drive for lunch, which is the correct way to arrive.
When to go
Fall football Saturdays are the hotel’s reason for being and its most expensive nights; the stadium is a ten-minute walk and the roof is the pregame. Commencement week in May is the same at a higher price. Gammage season, the Broadway tours from fall to spring, makes it a weeknight hotel for a show. Spring training in March fills it with Angels fans, since Diablo Stadium is ten minutes west. Summer is the bargain: the campus is empty, the rates drop, and the rooftop pool at dusk is the point of the trip. Weekday conferences are the hotel’s bread and butter; a leisure guest midweek will share the lobby with name badges.
What to do
Have the sunset drink at Lucero, whatever else you do, and stay for dinner if the table is good. Swim on the roof before breakfast, when the deck is empty and the campus below is quiet. Walk the campus: Old Main, the Palm Walk, the Memorial Union and Sun Devil Stadium are all within ten minutes, and ASU Gammage, Frank Lloyd Wright’s last public building, is fifteen minutes down Mill and the East Valley’s great piece of architecture; our Wright note has the story. Walk north on Mill for the bars, the lake and the Hayden Flour Mill.
With kids
A good family hotel for a campus visit, with a pool that is a destination and a corner that puts everything on foot. The Chuckbox across the street handles lunch. Teenagers touring ASU will want to stay here and nowhere else.
The neighborhood
University and Mill is the hinge of Tempe: campus to the south and east, downtown to the north and west. The light-rail and streetcar stops are a block away, which connect the hotel to the airport in one direction and Mesa in the other without a car.
The story
Arizona State spent its first 130 years without a hotel at its door. Visitors to the Tempe campus stayed at the motels along Apache Boulevard, at the Mission Palms a few blocks up Mill, or, if they could afford it, in Scottsdale, which is where the university’s donors and recruits’ parents went and which is how a great many Scottsdale visitors first learned the drive down Rural Road. The university, by the 2010s the largest in the country by enrollment, wanted a conference hotel of its own, and in 2019 announced a partnership with Omni Hotels & Resorts for a tower on university land at the corner of University Drive and Mill Avenue, the gateway between campus and downtown.
Construction ran through the pandemic and the hotel welcomed its first guests on April 27, 2023, with 330 rooms, the largest ballroom in Tempe and the rooftop pool and restaurant that make it more than a conference box. It was the first new full-service hotel in downtown Tempe in years and the anchor of a corner that had been parking lots, and it joined a wave of towers that have remade the north side of the campus since the lake was filled in 1999. Omni runs it under its ASU name, with the university’s colors and a good deal of Sun Devil branding, and the two share event business.
The Scottsdale connection
Omni’s other Valley property is the Montelucia in Paradise Valley, a Moorish-styled resort under Camelback Mountain with a spa and a dozen acres of gardens, and the two could not be more different: the Montelucia is the Scottsdale-area vacation, the Tempe hotel is the Tempe weekend. Many Scottsdale families know the Omni Tempe as the place the visiting grandparents stay for graduation. For the hotel’s guests it works the other way: Old Town, the Preserve and the resorts are the day trip north.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road south from Old Town; it becomes Rural Road at the Tempe line. West on University Drive to Mill Avenue; the hotel is on the corner, with valet at the door. About eighteen minutes with no traffic, and more like thirty on a football Saturday, when the better plan is to arrive early and stay put. From Sky Harbor it is ten minutes on the 202 or Rio Salado Parkway. The Valley Metro light rail and streetcar stop a block away; our getting around note has the rideshare math, and Old Town to the Omni is a reasonable fare.