Every Scottsdale resort worth knowing — past and present
Scottsdale didn’t stumble into being a resort town — it invented the modern desert vacation, one property at a time: 1910s health-seeker inns, dude ranches with real wranglers, Rat Pack pool decks, and today’s five-star golf-and-spa compounds. This is the working archive — 23 resorts you can check into right now and 10 legends we’ve lost, each with who it’s actually for, what it costs, and the story behind it. Every page has a reading-depth toggle: skim it in 30 seconds or go full rabbit hole.
Openings by decade
Tap a decade to filter to the resorts born in it. Height = how many opened.
33 of 33 showing
Hotel Valley Ho
Scottsdale's 1956 midcentury masterpiece — the walkable Old Town hotel where Hollywood hid from the press, Ramada nearly loved it to death, and an $80 million restoration brought back every breezeblock, terrazzo floor and pastel panel exactly where architect Edward Varney put them.
$$$ Since 1956
JW Marriott Camelback Inn
The Valley's original grand desert resort: 453 adobe casitas between Camelback and Mummy mountains, open every season since 1936, and the property that taught the Marriott family what a resort even was — they liked it so much they bought it.
$$$$ Since 1936
The Phoenician
Charles Keating's infamous 1988 desert palace at the foot of Camelback Mountain — built with other people's money, seized by the government, and matured into Scottsdale's definitive luxury resort, with a mother-of-pearl-tiled pool and the Jokake Inn's 1936 bell towers still standing on the lawn.
$$$$ Since 1988
Safari Hotel
Opened November 1956 on Scottsdale Road, the Safari was the town's first true glamour hotel — modernist architecture, a legendary lounge circuit, the French Quarter restaurant, and a guest list from Sinatra's orbit — before decades of decline ended in 1998 closure and 1999 demolition. The Safari Drive condos hold its ground today.
Closed 1998
ADERO Scottsdale Resort
The former CopperWynd Resort, rebuilt for roughly $100 million and relaunched in 2020 as ADERO — a 177-room Autograph Collection retreat on a McDowell Mountains ridgeline inside a certified Dark Sky community, where the amenity list includes a resident 'star dude' and the Four Peaks sunrise from your balcony.
$$$ Since 2020 · roots 1997
Andaz Scottsdale Resort & Bungalows
Hyatt's 2016 design-forward reboot of the old Cottonwoods Resort: 201 single-story bungalows styled with work from the neighboring Cattle Track artist compound, a palette straight out of midcentury desert modernism, and Camelback framed at the end of the lawn.
$$$$ Since 2016
Caesars Republic Scottsdale
Opened March 2024 as the first non-gaming Caesars hotel in the U.S. — an 11-story, 265-room glass tower grafted onto Scottsdale Fashion Square, with celebrity chef Giada De Laurentiis running two Italian restaurants and a seventh-floor rooftop pool staring straight at Camelback.
$$$ Since 2024
CIVANA Wellness Resort & Spa
The 1960s-era Carefree Resort — once the little town's crown jewel — reborn in 2018 after a $50 million transformation as CIVANA: a wellness resort built on the contrarian idea that spa sanctuaries shouldn't cost Canyon Ranch money, with a European-style aqua circuit, a huge daily class calendar, and high-desert quiet.
$$$ Since 2018 · roots in the 1960s
Fairmont Scottsdale Princess
Scottsdale's biggest resort spectacle: a Spanish-colonial mega-property beside TPC Scottsdale that hosts the golf world every February, transforms into a six-million-light Christmas kingdom every December, and somehow keeps 750 rooms feeling like an event rather than a convention.
$$$$ Since 1987
Four Seasons Resort Scottsdale
Four Seasons service dropped into the boulder fields below Pinnacle Peak: 210 adobe casitas in the high Sonoran, first-priority access to Troon North's two legendary golf courses, and the darkest, quietest, most saguaro-dense luxury stay in greater Scottsdale.
$$$$ Since 1999
Grand Hyatt Scottsdale Resort
The Gainey Ranch landmark that spent four decades as the Hyatt Regency Scottsdale — famous for its 2.5-acre 'water playground,' Venetian-style gondola rides and Frank Lloyd Wright-inflected architecture — reborn in late 2024 as Arizona's first Grand Hyatt after a $115 million renovation.
$$$$ Since 1986
Great Wolf Lodge Arizona
The chain's first Southwest lodge, opened 2019 on Salt River Pima-Maricopa land beside Scottsdale: 350 family suites wrapped around an 85,000-square-foot indoor waterpark held at 84 degrees — which quietly makes it the only Scottsdale-area resort where a 115-degree July is irrelevant.
$$$ Since 2019
Hilton Scottsdale Resort & Villas
Bob Karatz's 1973 resort with the landmark bell tower at Scottsdale Road and Lincoln — a compact garden property whose two-bedroom villas, $24 million renovation and attached Hilton Village shops make it the practical insider's base at the corridor's busiest crossroads.
$$$ Since 1973
Kimpton Miralina Resort & Villas
For nearly fifty years this was The Scottsdale Plaza Resort — a family-run, 42-acre Spanish-Mediterranean garden property with five pools on the Scottsdale–Paradise Valley line. Rebranded as Kimpton Miralina Resort & Villas in 2026, it's now IHG's luxury-lifestyle flag on one of the biggest resort footprints in the corridor.
$$$ Since 1976
Mountain Shadows Resort
Paradise Valley's 1959 Rat Pack playground — closed 2004, demolished 2014, and rebuilt from the ground up by 2017 as a $100 million modernist homage, with the beloved par-3 Short Course and Hearth '61 keeping the address's two great traditions: golf you can gamble on and dinners with Camelback filling the window.
$$$ 1959 · reborn 2017
Omni Scottsdale Resort & Spa at Montelucia
A $335 million Andalusian fantasy that opened in 2008 on the site of the old La Posada Resort — bell towers, courtyards and Camelback filling the southern sky — survived its developer's collapse, and settled in under Omni as the corridor's most romantic big resort, crowned by the Moroccan-themed Joya Spa.
$$$$ Since 2008
Sanctuary Camelback Mountain
The celebrity hideout built into Camelback's northern slope: 109 casitas on the site of the 1956 Paradise Valley Racquet Club and John Gardiner's fabled tennis ranch, reborn in 2001 as Sanctuary — infinity pool, Asian-inflected spa, and Elements' sunset dining room hanging over the Valley.
$$$$ Since 2001
Talking Stick Resort
The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community's 15-story, 496-room casino resort — opened 2010 just across Scottsdale's eastern line — with the state's flashiest gaming floor, a rooftop-caliber view lounge, headline entertainment, and spring training and Topgolf as next-door neighbors.
$$ Since 2010
The Boulders Resort & Spa
A 1,300-acre high-desert hideaway on the Carefree border where adobe casitas are literally molded around 12-million-year-old granite boulder piles — with two Jay Morrish golf courses, a landmark spa, and the most architecture-in-service-of-landscape design of any Arizona resort.
$$$$ Since 1985
The Hermosa Inn
Cowboy artist Lon Megargee hand-built Casa Hermosa in the mid-1930s as home, studio and (legend says) speakeasy; ninety years, one fire and one loving restoration later, it's a 43-casita adobe hideaway whose restaurant — Lon's — is the most romantic dinner patio in the Valley.
$$$$ Since the 1930s
The Scott Resort & Spa
Opened November 1961 as the Executive House Arizonian, this shape-shifting Old Town stalwart has been the Sunburst, the Caleo and Kimpton's FireSky before its 2017 reinvention as The Scott — a green-tiled, palm-shaded Bauhaus-meets-Havana fantasy with two pools and a sandy 'beach' minutes from the bar district.
$$$ Since 1961
The Scottsdale Resort & Spa
Opened September 1976 on the old McCormick cattle-and-Arabian ranch as the first purpose-built conference resort in America — now a $40 million-refreshed Curio Collection hacienda surrounded by the lakes, golf courses and bike paths of McCormick Ranch.
$$$ Since 1976
The Westin Kierland Resort & Spa
The 2002-built anchor of the Kierland district: 735 rooms, 27 holes of golf, a lazy river and FlowRider wave for the kids, Scotch and a sunset bagpiper for the grown-ups — the rare mega-resort that runs on genuine good cheer, with Kierland Commons' shops and restaurants across the street.
$$$ Since 2002
W Scottsdale
The 2008 arrival that formalized Old Town's party era: a glass-and-steel W with the WET Deck pool scene above Camelback Road, Sushi Roku downstairs, and the entertainment district's entire bar grid as its de facto lobby — Scottsdale's designated urban-resort id.
$$$ Since 2008
Casa Blanca Inn
A 1920s desert mansion turned Moroccan-fantasy resort: George Borg crowned it with an onion dome in the 1940s, hotel operators opened it as the Casa Blanca Inn in 1953, and for three decades Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable and Eisenhower-era society dined at the Sultan's Table — until the 1980s converted it all to a gated community that kept the dome as a clubhouse.
Closed 1982
Ingleside Inn
Built as the private Ingleside Club in 1909 by canal magnates W.J. and Ralph Murphy amid their citrus groves south of Camelback, it became the Valley's first true luxury resort in the 1920s — golf course, cottages, gala winters — and invented the playbook every Scottsdale resort still runs. It closed in the early 1940s; a school and then subdivisions took the land.
Closed 1942
John Gardiner's Tennis Ranch
Born as the Paradise Valley Racquet Club in October 1956 and transformed by tennis-resort pioneer John Gardiner after 1967, the Tennis Ranch on Camelback ran up to 18 courts for the country's power elite — its bipartisan Senator's Cup a Washington institution — until the boutique-spa era remade the mountainside as Sanctuary in 2001.
Closed 2001
Jokake Inn
Begun as a painter's family tearoom in 1926 and named 'mud house' by a Hopi visitor, the Jokake Inn grew into one of winter Scottsdale's defining resorts — easterners, titans and titled Europeans in adobe casitas below Camelback. The resort faded in the 1970s, but its twin 1936 bell towers still stand on The Phoenician's grounds: Scottsdale's oldest surviving resort architecture.
Closed 1979
La Posada Resort
The 1970s hacienda sprawl on Lincoln Drive whose lagoon pool and swim-up grotto bar — a waterfall-curtained cave you floated into — made it three generations of Valley kids' favorite resort memory. Sold for $31 million in 2004 and razed for the Montelucia, it survives as the corridor's most fondly mourned ghost.
Closed 2004
Paradise Inn
Opened just after World War II beside the older Jokake Inn, the Paradise Inn was the Camelback corridor's postwar workhorse — four decades of winter seasons, tennis whites and casita Christmases — until Charles Keating bought the neighborhood in the mid-1980s and The Phoenician's construction erased it.
Closed 1987
Smoke Tree Resort
A 1954 ranch-style holdout that stayed small while Lincoln Drive went five-star — a few dozen casitas, decades of loyal snowbirds, and The Other Place restaurant out front — until disrepair and bankruptcy closed it in 2020. Walton Global bought the site in 2022 with an approved boutique-hotel redevelopment; the corridor's dude-ranch scale ends with it.
Closed 2020
The Cottonwoods Resort
Opened in 1980 as the Alamos and soon renamed for its cottonwood shade, this 23-acre casita resort on lower Scottsdale Road spent 34 years as the corridor's unassuming insider haunt — its Moriah restaurant a steady local meeting spot — before closing in 2014 and passing its low-slung DNA directly to the Andaz that replaced it.
Closed 2014
The Registry Resort
Opened 1977 on 36 acres of McCormick Ranch land, the Registry was late-'70s and '80s Scottsdale at maximum wattage — stadium-court tennis tournaments, showroom entertainment, power conventions — before bankruptcy, a Radisson rebadging, 2005 closure and a 2007 date with the wrecking ball for condo development.
Closed 2005
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“Gone but not forgotten” entries cover resorts that built Scottsdale’s reputation but have closed or been demolished. They’re kept here as local history — and as a reminder that even a landmark with a thousand rooms can vanish when the land under it gets valuable enough.