What is Hyatt Place Scottsdale/Old Town?
It’s the hotel you pick when you want to be in Old Town and don’t want to pay for a resort. Hyatt Place Scottsdale/Old Town is a stucco select-service hotel with 126 rooms on Third Avenue just east of Scottsdale Road. That puts it a block from the Stetson Drive bar blocks, a few minutes from the Civic Center, and about half a mile from Scottsdale Fashion Square.
It didn’t start as a Hyatt. It opened in 1998 as an AmeriSuites, a 128-unit “all-suite” business hotel with southwestern styling that the chain promoted as walkable to the Civic Center and a block from the mall. Hyatt bought AmeriSuites in late 2004 and relaunched it as Hyatt Place two years later, and this building took the new name.
The format is still about convenience. Rooms have Hyatt Place’s sitting area with a corner sofa bed, so a family of four or two friends who don’t want to share a bed can fit. Breakfast is included, there’s an outdoor pool, and dogs and cats are accepted. There is no restaurant to speak of, and that’s the point. You’re surrounded by Old Town’s restaurants and should be out eating at them.
Who should stay elsewhere: anyone who wants a pool scene, spa or resort grounds, and light sleepers who are visiting on a big weekend. For a long weekend of walking everywhere, it’s one of the most sensible addresses downtown.
How to do the Hyatt Place right
Use the breakfast, then walk. The included breakfast covers the morning. From there, everything in central Old Town is a walk: the Civic Center lawns and the Little Red Schoolhouse to the south, Fashion Square and the Waterfront to the northwest. Park the car on day one and you may not need it again until you leave.
Pick your side for sleep. Third Avenue sits at the northern edge of the nightlife district. Most nights that means a short walk home. On spring-break, WM Phoenix Open and big-concert weekends, it means late noise from the street. Ask for a room facing away from the bar blocks and bring earplugs if you’re a light sleeper.
Spring training on foot. Scottsdale Stadium, the Giants’ spring home, is roughly two-thirds of a mile south through the Civic Center. In March that walk beats any parking lot. Book months ahead for February and March, when every Old Town hotel fills.
Know what it isn’t. The pool is a hotel pool and the building is a late-1990s chain hotel with updated rooms. If you want a scene, the W is up the street. If you want architecture, the Valley Ho is a fifteen-minute walk west. What the Hyatt Place gives you is a reliable room in the right place, with breakfast included.
Dinner nearby. Citizen Public House and FnB are short walks into the old core, and CALA at Senna House is a few blocks northeast.
The late-1990s hotels that filled in downtown
The Hyatt Place belongs to a small group of hotels that opened in downtown Scottsdale around 1998 and 1999: the AmeriSuites on Third Avenue, a Summerfield Suites (now Hyatt House) around the corner on Drinkwater Boulevard, and a Hilton Garden Inn on Indian School Road. All three were business-traveler hotels, and all three were built in the blocks between the Civic Center and Fashion Square.
The timing makes sense. The 1990s were when Fashion Square grew from a regional mall into the Southwest’s big luxury mall, with new anchors and a bridge over Camelback Road. The city had also just finished rerouting through traffic around downtown on the Goldwater and Drinkwater one-way pair. Downtown was turning into a place people stayed, not only a place they drove through. The chains came for business travelers, mall shoppers and visitors who wanted Old Town without a resort bill.
AmeriSuites was a product of that era. Its parent, Prime Hospitality, was growing an “all-suite” chain aimed at business travelers, and its January 1999 announcement described the Scottsdale opening as its third in the Phoenix area. Five years later, in December 2004, Hyatt bought the chain from Blackstone affiliates. In 2006 Hyatt turned it into Hyatt Place, a new select-service brand built around open lobbies, included breakfast and rooms with a separate sitting area. The Scottsdale building took the name, and the AmeriSuites brand disappeared.
What changed around it is the bigger story. When the hotel opened, the blocks to its south were a handful of taverns. Martini Ranch had arrived on Stetson Drive in 1994. Over the next decade, ultra-lounges, the 2008 W Scottsdale and the pool-party economy turned those blocks into the country’s bachelorette capital. A quiet business hotel ended up a block from one of the busiest bar districts in the West. That’s why it’s so useful now: you can walk to the action and still sleep in a plain, quiet room.
It’s not a landmark and doesn’t pretend to be. It’s part of how Old Town filled in at the end of the 1990s, and it still does the same job.