What is Scottsdale Camelback Resort?
Scottsdale Camelback Resort is a cluster of Spanish-style villas on Camelback Road, just east of the Phoenician. It was built in the early 1980s as an all-villa timeshare, and it still works that way. There are 111 villas in 25 two-story buildings on 11 landscaped acres. There’s no lobby tower, no ballroom and no elevator.
What you get instead is an apartment. Every villa has a full kitchen, a washer and dryer, a private patio or balcony, a whirlpool tub and a wood-burning fireplace, which sounds silly in Arizona until you’re here on a 45-degree January night. Units run from loft studios that sleep four up to three-bedroom villas that sleep eight. Outside are a pool, a children’s pool, a hot tub, three lighted tennis courts, pickleball, mini golf, a playground, the small Running Water Spa and SPLASH!, the poolside restaurant and bar.
The name is a little misleading. The mailing address says Scottsdale, but the resort is inside the City of Phoenix, on the Phoenix side of the line. It doesn’t change much: Scottsdale Fashion Square is about a 15-minute walk east, and Old Town is a short drive.
It suits families, groups of friends splitting a two- or three-bedroom unit, snowbirds staying a month, and anyone who’d rather cook breakfast than pay resort prices for it. It doesn’t suit people who want daily housekeeping, room service on demand or a grand-resort lobby. For that, the Phoenician is next door.
How to do Scottsdale Camelback Resort right
Book the right villa. The studios are loft units, so expect stairs inside. The two-bedroom villas are the sweet spot for families or two couples. The three-bedroom Barcelona units are the resort’s largest. There are no elevators anywhere, so ask for the ground floor if you need it.
Shop on the way in. The kitchens are real, with a stovetop, microwave, dishwasher and fridge-freezer, so the savings come from using them. AJ’s Fine Foods, the resort corridor’s upscale grocer, is about ten minutes up Scottsdale Road.
Walk to the mall and the canal. Fashion Square is roughly a 15-minute walk, and the Scottsdale Waterfront and the Arizona Canal path are a little farther. Most Camelback Road resorts are drive-only. This one isn’t.
Know the timeshare rules. Housekeeping is on request, not daily. There’s a nightly resort fee and a deposit at check-in, and check-out is at 10 a.m. Plan your last morning around that.
Use the spa and the courts. The Running Water Spa is small, with four treatment rooms and in-villa massage, so book ahead. The lighted tennis courts are at their best on cool winter evenings.
Spring training and big weeks. Scottsdale Stadium is about ten minutes away by car. During spring training and the week of the WM Phoenix Open, multi-bedroom villas are some of the first rooms in town to go, so book early.
A timeshare on the oldest resort road in town
The ground under these villas belongs to the first chapter of Valley resort history. In 1909 the Ingleside club opened among the citrus groves near 64th Street and Indian School Road, about a mile south of here, and it became the area’s first luxury winter resort. In 1926 the Jokake Inn began as a tearoom just to the west, and after World War II the Paradise Inn went up beside it. For decades this stretch of Camelback Road meant winter guests, casitas and citrus. Scottsdale itself was still a small farm town a little over a mile east.
The villas came in the next wave. By the early 1980s Scottsdale was booming. Scottsdale Road was filling with resorts, and new hotels in McCormick Ranch had shown that visitors would stay in planned communities as well as on mountain slopes. The timeshare model fit the market. Winter visitors returned to the same week year after year, and selling those weeks paid for the buildings. Our WorldMark guide tells the corporate side of that story. Scottsdale Camelback Resort is the independent side: a Spanish-style compound, with units sold to individual owners and county records that still list the villas one by one.
Then the neighborhood changed around it. In the mid-1980s Charles Keating assembled the Jokake and Paradise Inn land next door for the Phoenician, which opened in 1988 at a cost that drew national attention. Almost overnight, the timeshare compound on the corner sat beside the most expensive resort address in the Valley.
It also sits on the Phoenix side of a famously confusing line. The Phoenician has a Scottsdale address; this resort has one too but is legally in Phoenix; Arcadia, the citrus-lot neighborhood across Camelback Road, is Phoenix through and through. Our explainer on whether Scottsdale is in Phoenix covers how that happened.
Today the resort is still independent. Vacatia manages it, rents villas nightly and sells timeshare, and the resort also turns up in points and exchange programs such as Sapphire Resorts. It’s an unflashy kind of survivor. The big hotel companies spent the 1990s and 2000s building branded club resorts farther north, and this one simply kept its fireplaces, its tennis courts and its 11 acres in one of the best-located spots on the road.