Where should I stay in Phoenix?

Stay in Downtown Phoenix near Roosevelt Row if this is your first visit. The PHX Sky Train connects airport terminals to the 44th Street light rail station, and Valley Metro runs west from there to Central Avenue in about 15 minutes for $2 a ride. From a hotel on Central between McDowell Road and Van Buren Street, you can walk to the Phoenix Art Museum (opened 1959, $25 adult admission) in 8 minutes and the Heard Museum (opened 1929, $25 adult) in 12. Roosevelt Row runs 10 blocks of murals and galleries between 7th Avenue and 16th Street. Mid-range hotels here cost $130-200 per night in summer. Right now in mid-June, Phoenix sits at 40°C by noon with 17% humidity. The dry air hits you like an open oven the moment you step outside. A hotel with a pool is not optional from May through September.

Old Town Scottsdale sits about 15 minutes northeast of downtown by car. No light rail reaches there, so budget $12-18 for a rideshare each way. The restaurant density is better than anywhere else in the metro. Citizen Public House on Goldwater Boulevard does pork belly and bourbon for $18-25 a plate. Barrio Queen serves Oaxacan-style mole and tableside guacamole at $15-22. Hotels in Old Town range from $160-280 in summer. The Saguaro on North Scottsdale Road, its exterior painted in bands of yellow, orange, and red, runs about $170 in June and has a good pool scene. That said, Old Town on weekend nights gets loud. The bar strip along Scottsdale Road south of Camelback fills up by 10pm on Fridays, so request a room facing away from the street if you sleep light.

Tempe near Arizona State University is the budget pick at $80-130 per night in summer. Mill Avenue has enough restaurants and bars that you won't need a car most evenings, and the campus light rail station connects to both Sky Harbor and downtown Phoenix in under 20 minutes each direction. The trade-off is that Tempe is a college town. ASU's 70,000-plus students thin out in summer, which makes it quieter but means some spots close for the season. For the Camelback Corridor between Phoenix and Scottsdale, expect $180-350 per night. These neighborhoods put you 10 minutes from the Echo Canyon trailhead on Camelback Mountain. Mind you, start any summer hike before 5:30am. By 9am the trail surface radiates enough stored heat to burn through thin-soled shoes, and Camelback has no shade for most of the 2.5-mile summit route.

Skip the far west valley, meaning Glendale, Avondale, or Goodyear west of I-17, unless you're attending an event at State Farm Stadium. Those suburbs add 30-45 minutes of freeway driving to anything a first-time visitor wants to see. The Biltmore area around 24th Street and Camelback Road is the upscale option. The Arizona Biltmore resort, a 1929 property with Frank Lloyd Wright-influenced architecture, charges $350-550 in summer and $500-800 in peak season. Worth noting, summer is Phoenix's deep discount window. Hotels that cost $400 in February drop to $150 in July because the heat empties the city of tourists. If you can handle retreating to air conditioning between 11am and 4pm, you'll pay roughly half what winter visitors do and find shorter lines at the Desert Botanical Garden (opened 1937, $30 admission) and everywhere else.