Scottsdale Car Week 2027: An Insider's Travel Guide

My parents live in Scottsdale, so I\u2019ve spent a lot of Januarys in the desert. And every year, around the third week of the month, the whole valley changes. The light is that clean, low winter gold, the patios fill up, and somewhere out at WestWorld a Hemi fires up and a few thousand people feel it in their chest. If you love cars, there is no better week to be in Arizona \u2014 and if you\u2019ve never been, this is the year to fix that.

Scottsdale Car Week is easy to underestimate from a distance. Stand in the middle of it once, though, and it stays with you. It\u2019s part auction, part festival, part reunion of people who think a 1967 anything is a perfectly reasonable thing to fly across a continent for. Below is everything I\u2019d tell a friend who asked me how to do it \u2014 when to come, what\u2019s actually worth your time, and the one thing that catches almost everyone off guard.

What is Scottsdale Car Week?

The short version: it\u2019s the opening week of the collector car calendar, and it happens every January in and around Scottsdale and Phoenix. The whole tradition traces back to 1971, when Barrett-Jackson held its first sale here. That one auction grew into a cultural event that now pulls well over a hundred thousand people to the desert each year \u2014 and it drew in other auction houses, concours, cars-and-coffee meets and private gatherings until the entire week earned its own name. You\u2019ll hear it called Scottsdale Car Week and Arizona Auction Week interchangeably; they\u2019re the same thing.

What makes it matter beyond the spectacle is timing. Because it lands first on the calendar, the prices that get set in Scottsdale tend to set the tone for the entire collecting year. So even people who aren\u2019t buying show up just to see where the year is headed.

When is Scottsdale Car Week 2027?

The anchor of the week is the Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale Auction, and the 2027 dates are confirmed.

If you\u2019re planning travel around it, that last week of January is your window. And a piece of advice I\u2019ll come back to: that window fills up fast.

The auctions worth knowing

There are more sales during the week than any one person can reasonably attend. These are the ones I steer people toward, depending on what they\u2019re after.

Barrett-Jackson \u2014 the main stage

This is the big one, and the most fun to simply experience. Barrett-Jackson runs most of its cars at no reserve, which means the gavel falls and the car sells, full stop. That format makes for electric bidding, and an honest read on what the market will actually pay. Even if you never lift a paddle, the energy on the floor is the closest thing the car world has to a championship game.

RM Sotheby\u2019s \u2014 the curated room

Held at the historic Arizona Biltmore over in Phoenix, this is the quieter, more rarefied end of the week. Fewer cars, carefully chosen, the kind of pre-war classics and blue-chip Ferraris that draw a serious international crowd. The public preview the day before is one of the best free hours of the entire week if you just want to stand close to something extraordinary.

Bonhams \u2014 the connoisseur\u2019s pick

Smaller, intimate, and often the source of the week\u2019s most interesting provenance stories. A great stop if you like detail time with the cars and a calmer room.

And everything in between

The Arizona Concours d\u2019Elegance, gallery nights in Old Town, and early-morning cars-and-coffee gatherings round out the week. Half the magic of Scottsdale is what happens between the official events \u2014 over coffee, in a hotel lobby, beside someone else\u2019s barn find.

You come for the cars. You leave talking about the people you met standing next to them.

It\u2019s more than the auction block

Here\u2019s the part that surprises first-timers, and the reason I think this week travels so well even for partners and family who don\u2019t know a flat-six from a flathead: late January in Scottsdale is simply one of the best times to be in the American Southwest. Daytime highs sit in the high sixties while most of the continent is frozen solid. The Sonoran Desert is in its best season for hiking and golf. And Old Town\u2019s dining and gallery scene is at full tilt.

It\u2019s the kind of place where one person can spend the day at WestWorld while the other plays a championship course or settles into a long lunch \u2014 and you both come back to the same table with a good story. That balance is exactly why I build the trips the way I do.

The part nobody warns you about

The logistics. Scottsdale Car Week is wonderful and it is sprawling \u2014 venues are spread across Scottsdale and Phoenix, the best hotels sell out months ahead, traffic near WestWorld and Old Town slows to a crawl, and the events you most want to see often overlap. The people who have the best week are the ones who decided early, booked the right rooms close to the action, and had a plan for getting between venues without losing half a day to parking lots.

That\u2019s the gap I built Gatherwell to fill. When the logistics are handled, the week stops being a scramble. It becomes nine days of doing what you actually came to do. See how we structure the Scottsdale Car Week experience, or explore our more flexible Open Road option.

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