What is the Holiday Inn Express Scottsdale North?
The Holiday Inn Express Scottsdale North is the kind of hotel you’d drive past on Scottsdale Road without noticing, partly because it isn’t on Scottsdale Road. It sits a few hundred feet east on Gold Dust Avenue, a quiet side street just south of Shea Boulevard, in a three-story stucco building that opened in 1998 as the Comfort Inn Scottsdale. On January 5, 2011, the Comfort Inn closed. The next day it reopened as a Holiday Inn Express after a renovation reported at about $2 million.
What’s here is the standard Holiday Inn Express formula: 122 rooms off interior corridors, the free Express Start breakfast, an outdoor pool and hot tub around a courtyard, and a small fitness room. It isn’t trying to be a resort, and its rates usually reflect that.
The location is better than the building suggests. Walk a few blocks south and you’re at The Shops at Gainey Village, one of the city’s busiest restaurant strips: Hash Kitchen, Pomo and Frank & Lupe’s at the Shops at Gainey Ranch. Drive east on Shea and you’re into the Shea Corridor’s strip-mall restaurants. The Airpark, Kierland and Old Town are each roughly fifteen minutes away.
Who it’s for: business travelers with a meeting at the Airpark or a Scottsdale Road office park, families on a budget who want a pool and free breakfast, and anyone who’d rather spend their money at dinner. Who should look elsewhere: people who want to walk out the door into nightlife, or a hotel that feels like a vacation in itself.
How to do the Holiday Inn Express Scottsdale North right
Ask for the courtyard side. Gold Dust is a quiet street, but rooms facing the interior courtyard and pool are quieter still and have a better view than the parking lot.
Treat breakfast as fuel. The included breakfast handles weekday mornings. On a weekend, walk south to Gainey Village; Hash Kitchen’s Bloody Mary bar is the local brunch ritual. Go on a weekday if you’d rather not wait.
Drive Shea for dinner. The best value meals in this part of town are east along Shea Boulevard and Via Linda, in plain strip malls: Andreoli for Calabrian cooking, Chompie’s for New York deli. The Shea Corridor guide has the full list.
Ignore the Paradise Valley label. Some online listings file this hotel under Paradise Valley. It’s in Scottsdale, and it’s well placed for the Grand Hyatt side of Scottsdale Road.
Use the meeting rooms for small groups. The hotel has about 1,250 square feet of meeting space split between two rooms. That’s enough for a team offsite or a family-reunion breakfast.
Book early for big events. In January and February, the Barrett-Jackson auction and the WM Phoenix Open fill hotels across north Scottsdale, and select-service rooms like these go first.
The Scottsdale-and-Shea hotel cluster, and what a reflag says
The land just southeast of Scottsdale Road and Shea Boulevard was mostly horse property and open desert until the 1980s. Daniel Gainey’s Arabian horse ranch lay just to the south, and when it became the gated Gainey Ranch golf community in the 1980s, with the Hyatt Regency opening at its center in 1986, the land around it started to draw commercial development. Shea Boulevard became the north-central city’s main east–west road, and the blocks between Gainey Ranch and Shea filled in with offices, retail and, in the 1990s, a cluster of select-service hotels.
That cluster reflects a shift in Scottsdale’s hotel business. The resort corridor to the south was built for winter vacationers paying resort rates. By the 1990s, more of the city’s visitors were coming for business at the Airpark and Scottsdale Road offices, for youth sports and family visits, or simply on a budget. Brands like Comfort Inn, Hampton and La Quinta followed them with three-story stucco buildings near the arterials. The Comfort Inn Scottsdale on Gold Dust Avenue opened in 1998, a few blocks from the Hampton Inn at Shea, which had arrived in 1994.
The January 2011 switch to Holiday Inn Express shows how these hotels survive. A building that is a dozen years old in a competitive submarket loses ground unless it upgrades. Changing to a stronger brand brings a new reservation system and a larger loyalty program along with the remodel. The Comfort Inn closed on a Wednesday and reopened as a Holiday Inn Express on Thursday, with roughly $2 million in improvements behind the new sign. The rooms, the courtyard and the side-street address stayed the same.
Fifteen years later, the hotel is still filling that same role: a dependable, mid-priced room in the middle of the map. It isn’t part of Scottsdale’s resort story, but it is part of how the city actually houses its visitors.