Construction is Rarely every stress free.

eskimopie,
We haven't personally used Patio Pools but one of our neighbors in our previous house in Rancho Vistoso did. From everything I remember they had a good experience overall. We had used a small builder who only does 12 pools a year and had a great experience w/ him. Our neighbors chose Patio over him b/c their bid came in lower.
Our build went very smooth. We are now in the process of meeting w/ builders and getting bids on a pool in our new house. It's not as easy as last time b/c we have more room and more choices.
Good luck and I hope the process smooths out for you.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm somewhat surprised that nobody on here has first-hand experience with Patio Pools especially since they claim to have built something like 30% of all pools in Arizona.

When you consider the number of pools there are in Az, 30% probably isn't all that many (relatively speaking). I don't want to generalize, but I think most people who would go w/ Patio Pools wouldn't necessarily be checking out a forum like this. You know, it's one of those, Hey let's put in a pool! Yeah, let's call Patio; I see them everywhere. kind of things.
Since we went w/ a small builder on our last pool (on the advice of a freind who had used him) we just knew that was the direction we wanted to go this time. What also added to our decision was that we called one of the companies you see in the Saguaro Gold advertizer or one of those type of mailers. You know the ads, small play pool for $16K or so. It might have been Patio but I really can't remember. They came out, told us they wanted to take down half our wall between our house and our neighbors and add an extra $4K to the cost of the pool to rebuild the wall. Then they never even came back w/ a bid. It kind of left a bad taste in our mouth for the bigger companies.
Good luck w/ your build.

My MIL hired Patio Pools in Tucson last February to remodel their existing pool, then decided to sell the home to us. She paid half of the $18,000 up front. We then were the ones to deal with them during the renovation. Old plaster was to be removed and replaced with pebble tec, steps flared, cool decking repaired and refinished and a new sand filter installed. Work was to be started at the middle of April, lasting six to eight weeks. They started on time - removing the old plaster - but we didn't see them again for weeks. After a few phone calls asking about the status someone would come by and work for an hour or so and then leave, really not doing much. We tried to be patient but were getting annoyed. One day when one of the tecs stopped by I casually made the comment that they must be really swamped. His response was that no, actually this was their slow time of the year because people here don't want their pools down during hot weather... We started calling about once a week trying to find out what was going on and were always transfered to the project manager's voice mail. He never responded, so I finally called asking who his supervisor was. The office gal got flustered and magically, he called me! There was always an excuse. So and so was on vacation, the project manager was the only one with enough experience to do the electrical work, and on and on. One day a tec came out lugging the new filter - Yay! I was busy, so stayed out of the way. After he left I walked out to take a look. What?! Our spa filter was missing, the new pool filter was in it's place and our old pool filter was still there. I made a quick call and they came right back out looking pretty embarrassed and reconfigured things. That fellow told me that the pool was ready to be finished, Wonderful, we thought - Our son's birthday was in June so it'd be ready for his party! We planned the party for a bunch of 14 year olds and a barbecue. Had to cancel it though. After call on top of call with no response they finally sent out a crew to do the pebble tec in AUGUST. That morning, unbeknownst to me, Patio Pools called my MIL and made sure to get the final payment... I noticed that the truck wasn't one of the Patio Pools ones we had gotten used to and the foreman told me that I had gotten lucky because the Patio Pools guys do a lousy job. I have no clue if that's true. As they were packing up to leave I noticed a big wooden box lined with plastic, full of water and the remnants of the pebble tec in our back yard..The foreman said that Patio Pools would remove it the next day when they came to acid wash. We also found pebble tec on our concrete patio, cool decking, block wall, hand rails, patio furniture and trash dumpster in the alley. The pool acid wash fellows came and just shook their heads at the mess. The next day the start-up fellow came. The plumbing and filter leaked in several places and I was told that no, the pebble tec crew was supposed to have removed the big wooden box and cleaned up. It took three visits by Patio Pools to fix all of the leaks, with the project manager finally coming out to fix it himself while telling me what idiots his employees were. He said that we needed our start-up chemicals but didn't have enough on the truck but would be back the next day. We never saw him again, so my husband did the start up chemicals himself. Meanwhile he sent a crew out to power wash the pebble tec off of everything. When they were done I walked out to take a look... Turned out that they power washed a good portion of our old patio, removing the top layer of concrete and where they had cleaned the cool decking it was hazed and chipped. Again I called and they sent out a crew to redo the decking. By that point we were sooo glad to be done with Patio Pools that we scrubbed the pebble off of the rails ourselves and painted our block wall. And just think...This was only a renovation! If a six to eight week job ended up taking four months I can't imagine having a new pool done by them.
As a side note -- Close to the end of the project we walked into their 22nd St. store to order a new diving board. Though they weren't busy at all, no one would give us the time of day. We finally ended up walking out and going to Leslie's. Service there has been great.