Briefing
- Three major international hotel brands announced new Jamaica coastal properties in Q1 2018.
- Coastal land prices in St Ann and Trelawny rose significantly on the back of development demand.
- NEPA processed a record number of EIA submissions in the first quarter.
- A UWI research paper documented accelerating reef decline at north coast monitoring sites.
- The government confirmed the Harmony Cove development as a priority investment project.
The Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association’s annual industry outlook, presented in January 2018, identified the next five years as the most significant investment period in Jamaica’s tourism history. The pipeline of new room supply under development or formally committed was larger than at any point since the pre-2008 boom, and the quality tier of the incoming investment was higher: the brands announcing Jamaica properties in early 2018 were luxury and upper-upscale chains seeking to position the island at the premium end of Caribbean tourism, a strategic shift the government’s Jamaica Tourist Board had been actively pursuing.
The strategic logic was coherent: fewer, wealthier visitors spending more per stay generates higher foreign exchange earnings per tourist arrival than mass-volume, lower-spend visitors. Moving up-market also, in theory, reduces the physical footprint of the industry relative to its economic output. The problem with this logic, as environmental advocates were beginning to articulate with greater precision, was that luxury resort development does not necessarily mean smaller coastal impact. A luxury resort with 200 rooms on a sensitive coastal site may have a smaller visitor volume than a 1,000-room all-inclusive, but its construction and operation still involve significant modification of the shoreline, the reef system, and the water body in front of it.
Reef Decline Documented
A research paper published by University of the West Indies marine scientists in February 2018 presented updated data from long-term monitoring stations on Jamaica’s north coast reefs. The paper documented a continued decline in live coral cover since the 2016 bleaching event, with limited recovery at several sites that had previously shown resilience. The researchers noted that the rate of post-bleaching recovery they were observing in 2017–18 was slower than the recovery rates they had documented following the 2010 bleaching event, suggesting that repeated thermal stress was reducing the reefs’ capacity to rebuild between events.
The data was available to anyone who looked for it. It was not prominently featured in the investment prospectuses circulating through Jamaica’s hotel development community. The gap between the scientific record of the coast’s ecological state and the marketing narrative of Jamaica as an unspoiled tropical paradise was not a gap that the planning system was equipped or motivated to close.
Harmony Cove Confirmed
The government’s formal designation of Harmony Cove in Trelawny as a priority investment project in Q1 2018 cleared a significant administrative hurdle for the development and signalled governmental support at the highest level. The project’s scale — over 2,000 acres, a planned capacity of several thousand hotel rooms across multiple properties, a marina, and residential development — made it potentially the largest single coastal development in Jamaica’s history. Environmental groups that had been monitoring the project’s progress noted that the priority designation would likely accelerate the regulatory timeline and reduce the friction an application of this scale would otherwise encounter.
Related: Property Market Analysis | Latest Jamaica News
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