What is Element Scottsdale at SkySong?
Element Scottsdale at SkySong is a 157-room extended-stay hotel at the south end of Scottsdale Road, on the campus of SkySong, the ASU Scottsdale Innovation Center. It opened in mid-2019 under Element, the Marriott brand built around rooms with full kitchens, an included breakfast and a pared-back, light-filled look.
Most people booking it are here for a practical reason. They have business at SkySong or ASU, a two-week project, a family visit in south Scottsdale, or they need to be close to the airport. Phoenix Sky Harbor is about five miles away. Old Town is about two miles north. Scottsdale Stadium, where the Giants play their spring training games, is a short drive. You can make your own breakfast and dinner, do laundry, and not pay resort prices for the privilege.
The location also has a history. The ground under SkySong was Los Arcos Mall, Scottsdale’s first enclosed mall, from 1969 until it closed in 1999. Then the lot sat empty through a long fight over what should replace it. The Element is part of the answer the city eventually got: offices, apartments and a hotel under SkySong’s white shade sail.
It isn’t a resort, and it doesn’t try to be one. The pool is a natural saline pool in an open-air courtyard, which is pleasant, but you won’t find a spa or a golf course. Choose it for the kitchen, the airport and a calm base. If you want a pool scene, book somewhere else.
How to do the Element right
Treat it like an apartment. The kitchen is the point. Stock up on groceries on day one and you skip the restaurant-every-meal habit that resort guests fall into. The included breakfast covers the mornings you can’t be bothered.
Eat on foot first. Fate Brewing, the big south Scottsdale brewpub with wood-fired pizzas, is just across Scottsdale Road. The SkySong campus and the intersection have more casual places within a walk. Farther afield but still a short drive are south Scottsdale’s best-value restaurants: Los Sombreros, DeFalco’s and Atlas Bistro on Scottsdale Road, and Night Owl over on Hayden.
Use the geography. The hotel sits where Scottsdale meets Tempe and Phoenix. Papago Park and the Desert Botanical Garden are a few miles west, ASU’s Tempe campus is a few miles south, and the Loop 202 and Loop 101 are close by. For a trip that splits time between Scottsdale and the rest of the Valley, this beats a hotel up north.
Pick your side. Scottsdale Road is busy. Light sleepers should ask for a room facing the courtyard.
Plan for parking. The hotel charges for parking, so ask about the current daily rate when you book, especially for a long stay.
Spring training math. In March, Scottsdale-area hotels fill and prices jump. Being this close to Scottsdale Stadium, and a quick freeway hop from Tempe Diablo Stadium, makes the Element a smart Cactus League base. Book early.
From dead mall to innovation campus: the corner the Element sits on
For most of the city’s postwar history, Scottsdale and McDowell was the center of south Scottsdale. The ranch-house grid filled in during the 1950s and ’60s. McDowell Road became the Motor Mile of car dealerships, and in 1969 Los Arcos Mall opened on this corner as the city’s first enclosed, air-conditioned mall, with Sears and The Broadway as anchors. Across the street, the pueblo-style Papago Plaza handled everyday errands.
Then the money moved north. Fashion Square expanded, newer centers opened, and Los Arcos lost anchors and shoppers through the 1990s. It closed in 1999. A plan to put a hockey arena on the site turned into one of the city’s bitterest fights and then collapsed, and the mall was demolished. For several years the lot was the most visible sign of south Scottsdale’s decline.
The fix was a partnership between the City of Scottsdale and the ASU Foundation. After the land changed hands in the mid-2000s, Plaza Companies became master developer of what was named SkySong, an office and research campus meant to bring technology jobs to the old retail corner. Its first building opened in March 2008 under the white tensile shade sail that is now the corner’s landmark. More office buildings, apartments and eventually a hotel followed.
That hotel is the Element. Jackson-Shaw developed it with investment partner Somera Capital Management. It was designed with Cooper Carry and built by Layton Construction, and it went up on the southwest corner of the campus near Scottsdale Road and Enterprise Drive. Crescent Hotels & Resorts took over management, and the hotel opened in mid-2019 with 157 rooms, about 2,200 square feet of meeting space and a large open-air courtyard around the saline pool.
The choice of brand says a lot about the corner. Starwood launched Element in 2008, the same year SkySong opened, as an extended-stay brand with an environmental angle. Marriott inherited it when it bought Starwood in 2016. Visiting researchers, relocating employees and consultants on long projects need kitchens and laundry more than they need a spa, so an extended-stay hotel fits a university-anchored office campus. Four years later a SpringHill Suites opened across Scottsdale Road on the old Papago Plaza site, and the intersection that had stood for south Scottsdale’s slide had two new hotels facing each other.