What it means
In most of the country, high season is summer. In Scottsdale it is the opposite, and that inversion is the whole meaning of the words. High season is the winter and spring stretch when the rest of the country is cold: roughly the second week of January to mid-April, priced for snowbirds, golfers, spring training and the Phoenix Open. Shoulder season is the two edges, late October to mid-December and late April into May. Low season, which the resorts prefer to call summer or “value season,” runs from June into September, when the afternoons pass 100 degrees and the rates fall by half or more.
You hear the words from hotel reservation agents, golf courses and restaurant owners, and locals use “the season” by itself to mean the winter crowd: “It’s quiet now, wait till the season.” The site’s best-time-to-visit guide ranks every month; this page explains the vocabulary and the rate calendar behind it.
Where you’ll meet it
On resort rate calendars; in golf course pricing, where the golf guide describes the January-to-April peak; on the month pages, such as March and July; and in the summer playbook, which explains how the rates drop after Mother’s Day.
Where the word came from
The terms are standard travel-industry vocabulary, and nobody coined them for Scottsdale. What is local is the calendar they describe, which is set by weather and by who can travel when.
The weather sets the boundaries. Experience Scottsdale’s averages run from a 69-degree high in January to 78 in March, 86 in April, 95 in May, 105 in July, 100 in September and 89 in October. The comfortable months are the ones when much of North America is cold, which is why the winter population swells with winter visitors and why the resorts fill. The tourism bureau’s own season names show the pattern: “spring,” February 16 to April 30, is its “peak outdoor season,” and “summer,” May 1 to September 15, is when it advertises accommodations discounted by up to 60 percent.
The events stack on top. Car week and the Barrett-Jackson auction in January, the Phoenix Open and the Arabian Horse Show in February, and spring training in March fill the peak, and each makes certain weeks sell out a year ahead. The holidays add a short spike at Christmas and New Year’s.
The data confirms the swing. Experience Scottsdale’s community affairs director told a local business column in 2022 that Scottsdale hotels “typically trend lower than the average of the U.S. hotel industry throughout the summer months” and higher than the U.S. average “during our peak tourism season January through April.”
What it is not
Shoulder season is not a bargain-basement season; rates are below peak but well above summer. And low season is not closed season: the resorts, the pools and most restaurants stay open, and the summer is when locals use them.
The fine print
The edges are fuzzy and differ by source. This site’s guide starts high season in the second week of January, when the holiday bargain ends; Experience Scottsdale’s “spring” starts February 16. Golf runs its own version: the courses are at their best from the post-overseeding reopening in mid-November, while the golf guide puts peak prices in January through April. The useful rule is to look at a resort’s rate calendar rather than the label.
The size of the swing shows in hotel numbers. In one week of June 2022, the STR data Experience Scottsdale commissions put Scottsdale and Paradise Valley occupancy at 54.9 percent, down from 64.6 percent in May, with an average daily rate of $215.26, down from $248.18 the week before. From January through April, by the same bureau’s account, the market runs above the national average instead.
Two charges do not follow the calendar. The nightly resort fee usually stays the same in July as in March, so a half-price room is not a half-price bill. And summer has its own peak days: Memorial Day, the Fourth and Labor Day fill with Valley families. For the cheapest pool time, the day pass is the summer tool, and the shoulder weeks of late October and early November remain the best value for weather on the calendar.