What is Sonesta Simply Suites Phoenix Scottsdale?
Most Scottsdale hotels are built for a long weekend. This one is built for a long month. Sonesta Simply Suites Phoenix Scottsdale is a three-story, 130-suite extended-stay hotel on 90th Street, just north of Shea Boulevard. It opened around 2000 as the TownePlace Suites by Marriott Scottsdale and changed flags in the 2020–21 breakup between its owner and Marriott. Some booking listings still use the old name, so don’t let that throw you.
The appeal is practical. Every studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom suite has a full kitchen: a full-size refrigerator, stovetop, microwave, dishwasher and real cookware. There’s a seasonal outdoor pool, a 24-hour gym, guest laundry, and a pet policy with no breed or weight limits. Nobody books it for the view.
What decides it is location. The hotel sits about a block from HonorHealth Scottsdale Shea Medical Center and about five miles west of the Mayo Clinic campus, in the middle of the Shea Corridor. That’s the stretch of east Scottsdale where people who live here do their eating, errands and doctor visits.
The guests are mostly people in town for a reason, not for a vacation: families supporting a patient through treatment, people relocating while they look at houses, traveling nurses, and project teams. If you want a pool scene or a walk to bars, look at Old Town. If you need a quiet base with a kitchen and the Loop 101 nearby, this is a sensible choice.
How to do a long stay on Shea right
Ask for the suite size that fits your stay. For one person, a studio is plenty. For a couple staying more than a week, or anyone working from the room, a one-bedroom is worth asking for, because having a door between the bed and the kitchen table helps. Two-bedroom suites suit a family sharing caregiving shifts.
Stock the kitchen on day one. The kitchens are the reason to stay here, and groceries are a short drive away. Cook most nights, and an extended stay costs far less and feels much less like living out of a suitcase.
Eat on Shea when you don’t cook. The corridor’s rule is that the plainer the strip mall, the better the food. Chompie’s covers deli breakfasts and comfort food, Sweet Republic is the ice cream stop, and Salt and Lime is in the same plazas. For sushi, Hiro Sushi is a few minutes south on 90th Street.
Plan around hospital traffic. Shea Boulevard gets heavy at shift change and when school lets out. The neighborhood guide suggests avoiding the boulevard between about 3 and 6 p.m. and using Via Linda, a half-mile south, to get east and west.
Bring the dog. Pets are welcome with no breed or weight limits, up to two per suite, for a flat fee that goes up after seven nights. The Mustang Library grounds a few blocks south on 90th Street are a pleasant place for an evening walk.
Know the parking rule. The hotel charges a small nightly fee per car. That’s unusual in suburban Scottsdale, so expect it at checkout.
How Shea Boulevard became a medical address
In 1980, 92nd Street and Shea was open desert. In 1984, Scottsdale Memorial Hospital opened a second campus there, Scottsdale Memorial Hospital North, betting the city would grow north and east toward it. The bet worked faster than anyone planned. In 1987, Mayo Clinic opened its Arizona practice on 180 acres farther east on Shea, choosing the boulevard partly because a hospital was already there. Within a few years Shea had become Scottsdale’s medical corridor, lined with medical offices, labs and pharmacies on the way to Mayo.
A medical corridor needs places for people to stay a while. Patients come for multi-day workups, families come to support them, and visiting doctors and contractors come for weeks. That’s the market Marriott built TownePlace Suites for. Marriott launched the brand in the late 1990s as a cheaper, apartment-style cousin of Residence Inn, and the Scottsdale location opened on 90th Street around 2000. That was also the period when the Loop 101 was finished through the city and growth moved toward the Airpark and the northeast.
The hotel ran as a Marriott for about two decades. By 2020 it belonged to Service Properties Trust, a Massachusetts real estate trust formerly called Hospitality Properties Trust. The trust had bought Sonesta, the old Massachusetts hotel company, in 2011. When the pandemic hit hotel income in 2020, the trust and Marriott fell out over payments. In late 2020 the trust ended Marriott’s management agreements on 122 hotels, and between December 2020 and January 2021 it moved most of them to Sonesta brands. The TownePlace Suites became a Sonesta Simply Suites, and the Courtyard at the Mayo Clinic farther east on Shea became a Sonesta Select. Service Properties Trust’s filings still list both Scottsdale hotels.
The building and the corridor are unchanged. Shea is still a local main street, with its best restaurants in strip malls and its biggest employers in medicine. HonorHealth’s Shea campus has grown into a full medical center, and Mayo has moved its hospital and much of its expansion to north Phoenix while keeping clinic and research work on Shea. Hotels like this one reflect that side of Scottsdale: most of its visitors aren’t here on vacation.