Affiliate disclosure
Scottsdale.tips is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate, this site earns from qualifying purchases.
In practice that means: product links in the Field Kit and anywhere else on the site that point to Amazon carry a tracking tag. If you click one and buy something, Amazon pays this site a small commission. The price you pay is the same either way. Every affiliate link is labeled where it appears, and the gear pages say so again at the top.
The “Pack” chips on the month-by-month guides link to the matching item in the Field Kit when we have tested one. Those chips are ordinary on-site links; the Amazon link is on the gear card they open, under the tested verdict, with the same label as everywhere else.
Scottsdale.tips is also a member of the Expedia Group Travel Creator Program. Guides to resorts and hotels that are open today may carry one “Check availability” link to the property’s page on Expedia, labeled “Paid link” where it appears. If you book a stay within seven days of clicking it, Expedia pays this site a commission on the room rate; the price you pay is the same either way. The link sits below the guide, after the history, the insider tip and the frank parts, and appears only on guides to properties that are open.
Scottsdale.tips is a member of the Viator Partner Program. Viator, a Tripadvisor company, is the marketplace most Scottsdale tour operators sell through: balloon flights, jeep and horseback tours, Old Town walking and food tours, Salt River kayaking, Sedona and Grand Canyon day trips, museum tickets. The tours page, and the “Tours & tickets” rail at the end of some guides, month pages, neighborhood pages and open-resort guides, link to those listings. Those are paid links: if you book an experience within thirty days of clicking one, Viator pays this site a commission on the booking, and the price you pay is the same either way. Every rail says so where it appears. The verdicts on the tours page come from our own tours guide, which was written before any booking link existed and still tells you to hike the Preserve for free first. Where a guide says a tour is a waste of a day, the booking link sits under that verdict.
Those are the site’s affiliate relationships: Amazon, Expedia and Viator. Restaurant, shopping, history, people, government, organization and lexicon pages link out with plain links, as do links to official sites, including each resort’s own website and each tour operator’s own website where a guide names one. A guide that mentions an operator by name does so because we recommend it.
Editorial policy
- Everything is bought and used. Gear is purchased at retail with our own money and tested in real desert conditions before it gets a page. If it fails, it doesn’t get a page, or its page says it failed.
- Merit decides coverage. Items are chosen because they hold up to Arizona sun, heat, and dust. If the best tool for a job is sold somewhere other than Amazon, the page says so and leaves the link out. A hotel gets a guide because it is part of the city, and the guide says the same things about it with or without a booking link. The same holds for tours: the free Conservancy hikes and our own Old Town walk are listed ahead of anything bookable, Taliesin West and the rest of what sells direct are named without a link, and the Grand Canyon day trip keeps its “we’d talk you out of it” verdict next to its booking link.
- All coverage is editorial. Every placement, review and edit on the site is the editors’ own decision, and every meal, room and product behind a verdict was paid for at retail.
- Opinions are ours. Where a page says a place is overrated, that’s a considered judgment from visiting. Where it says a place is great, the adjective is ours too.
- Dates are real. Every guide shows when its facts were last checked. Older stamps mean more caution on hours, prices, and whether a place still exists.
- Losses are preserved. Closed restaurants and demolished resorts stay on the site, clearly marked as gone, because they’re part of the city’s story.
Photos and illustrations
Most imagery on this site is original illustration. Where a photograph is used, it is either our own or a free-use image under a Creative Commons license, credited and linked beneath the image with its license. Amazon product images on gear pages are served from Amazon, per the Associates program rules.
Privacy notice
Short version: the site collects usage statistics through Google Analytics, sets one cookie of its own to remember that you have seen the notice at the foot of the screen, and sends you to its affiliate partners with a referral tag when you click a paid link. The rest of this section says how each of those works.
Information collected automatically
When you visit, Google Analytics 4 (the gtag.js script, which loads on every page) collects
information about how the site is used: the pages you view, the site or search engine that referred you,
your approximate location derived from your network address, the kind of device, browser and screen you use,
and how long you stay. It also records two kinds of on-site activity as events: the terms you type into the
site search, clicks on affiliate links (which product, hotel or tour, and which page the link was on), and
taps on a venue’s own phone, text, email or booking links on the nightlife pages (which venue, which channel).
Google processes this data under Google’s privacy policy
and the page on how Google uses data from partner sites.
Cookies and similar technologies
A cookie is a small text file your browser stores on behalf of a website. This site uses the following cookies and local storage keys. First-party means the value is set under the scottsdale.tips address; analytics cookies are set by the Google Analytics script running on this site.
| Name | Set by | Purpose | Category | Lasts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
st_consent | Scottsdale.tips | Records that you acknowledged the cookie and affiliate notice, which version of it, and when. | Strictly necessary, first-party cookie | 12 months |
_ga | Google Analytics | Assigns a random identifier that tells one visitor’s visits apart from another’s. | Analytics, first-party cookie | 2 years |
_ga_<id> | Google Analytics | Keeps the state of your current session for this property. | Analytics, first-party cookie | 2 years |
st-reading-mode | Scottsdale.tips | Remembers the reading-depth setting you choose on long guides. | Preference, local storage | Until you clear it |
scottsdale.tips:map:layers | Scottsdale.tips | Remembers which layers you switched off on the city map. | Preference, local storage | Until you clear it |
st-night-plan | Scottsdale.tips | Keeps the rooms you pick in the night planner. A plan you share travels only in the link’s address. | Preference, local storage | Until you clear it |
The st_consent value is also mirrored in local storage, so browsers that allow storage but
refuse cookies still remember the acknowledgement. Preference values stay in your browser and are read only
by the page that set them.
How the information is used
The site uses tracking to provide a better user experience and to run the site: to measure traffic, to see which guides are read and which are searched for, to find pages that are hard to use or that visitors leave quickly, to decide what to write and update next, and to measure which pages send clicks to the affiliate programs above so their reports can be reconciled. The analytics data is used in aggregate for those purposes.
Service providers and third parties
- Google Analytics (Google LLC) collects and processes the usage data described above and sets the analytics cookies in the table.
- Netlify hosts the site as static files and keeps standard web server logs (requested address, time, network address, browser) under Netlify’s privacy policy.
- Google Fonts serves the site’s typefaces, so your browser requests font files from Google when a page loads, under Google’s privacy policy.
- Amazon receives the referral tag on product links and, where you buy something, handles the purchase under Amazon’s privacy notice.
- Expedia, through Partnerize, which runs the Travel Creator Program’s tracking, sets a cookie on its own site to credit the referral, under Expedia’s privacy statement.
- Viator receives the partner ID carried in the web address of each tour link and sets its own cookie once you arrive, under Viator’s privacy policy.
Affiliate links and referral tracking
Clicking an Amazon, Expedia or Viator link tells that partner which site referred you; that is how the affiliate programs work. The partner sets its own cookie on its own site to credit a purchase or booking made within its attribution window (24 hours for Amazon, seven days for Expedia, thirty days for Viator), under its own privacy policy. Each click is also recorded in Google Analytics as an event naming the item and the page, with the same visitor identifier as the rest of your visit.
The venue links on the nightlife pages are not affiliate links. They are each bar’s own phone, text line, email and booking page; the site takes no bookings and earns nothing when you use them, and the tap is recorded only as the anonymous event described above.
Your choices
- Analytics. Install the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on, block the
googletagmanager.comdomain, or use a content blocker; each stops the analytics script from reporting. - Cookies. Your browser settings let you view, block and delete cookies and local storage for this site. Deleting the
_gacookies resets your visitor identifier. Deleting thest_consentcookie (and the matching local storage value) brings the notice at the foot of the screen back on your next page view. - Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control. The site’s analytics run the same way for every visitor, whether or not your browser sends a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal; use the options above to opt out.
- Affiliate links. Every paid link is labeled where it appears. Reaching a product, hotel or tour through its own website, or through a plain search, avoids the referral tag.
Data retention
Google Analytics keeps the event-level and visitor-level data it collects for two months, the default
retention period for this property, and keeps aggregated reports beyond that. The st_consent
cookie lasts 12 months and is then set again the next time you click “I understand”.
The analytics cookies last two years from your most recent visit.
Children
Scottsdale.tips is a general-audience travel guide written for adults planning a visit. It is directed at readers aged 16 and older.
Where the data is processed
The site is published in the United States, and the service providers above process the data there. Visiting from elsewhere means your usage data is transferred to and handled in the United States under the providers’ policies linked above.
Changes to this notice
When this notice changes in a way that matters to you (a new tracker, a new partner, a new use of the data), the date at the foot of this page moves and the notice at the foot of the screen appears again so you can read the new version.
Contact
Questions about this notice, requests about your data, and corrections to the site go to info@scottsdale.tips.
Accuracy and corrections
This is an independent field guide. We check what we can, but hours, prices, menus, and trail conditions change without notice, and the desert is dangerous in ways we cannot fully warn you about. Use the facts-checked date on each page, confirm anything critical with the venue or the city, and carry more water than you think you need. Corrections are welcome at info@scottsdale.tips, and we fold them into the next verification pass.
Last updated October 22, 2026 • Scottsdale.tips Editors