A Pathway Between Hotels: Jamaica Quietly Requires New North Coast Resorts to Open Beach Access to the Public

Briefing

• New resort approvals in Trelawny and St Ann include mandatory public beach corridors.
• Riu and Royalton projects among the first to carry the condition.
• Condition mirrors longstanding JaBBEM and advocacy group demands.
• Policy shift follows years of Cabinet-level beach access discussions.
• Corridor width and maintenance standards remain undefined in current approvals.

For years, the fight for public beach access in Jamaica was conducted largely in courts, in parliament, and in the photographs of locked gates and barbed wire fences that advocates circulated to make a visible argument about an invisible law. The Beach Control Act of 1956 technically guaranteed public access to the foreshore, but its provisions were rarely enforced, and the practical reality for Jamaicans seeking to reach beaches fronted by hotel compounds was one of indifference, obstruction, and uncertainty. In the spring of 2025, something shifted.

Major new resort approvals for the North Coast — among them, projects in Trelawny from international chains including Riu Hotels and Royalton — began carrying a condition that had not been standard in previous approvals: a requirement to provide a dedicated physical public access corridor to the beach. The condition was not inserted retroactively into the licences of existing hotels. It applied to new developments and expansions seeking planning consent in areas where the National Environment and Planning Agency had identified beach access deficits. But its appearance in formal planning documents represented something the advocacy community had long argued for: the integration of beach access rights into the development approval process itself, rather than their treatment as a separate legal or policy matter.

From Principle to Condition

The idea that planning permissions should incorporate beach access conditions is not new. Environmental and coastal planning frameworks in other jurisdictions — including coastal states in the United States and several European countries — have long required developers to provide or preserve public access as part of any approval affecting the coast. In Jamaica, the case for similar requirements had been made repeatedly by bodies including JaBBEM (Jamaica Beach Birthright Environmental Movement), the Jamaica National Heritage Trust, and academic researchers at the University of the West Indies. What was missing was the political and administrative will to encode it in the planning system.

The emergence of access corridor conditions in major North Coast approvals in 2025 suggested that the will, at least in part, had arrived. The conditions were understood to be connected to the wider Cabinet-level beach access policy process that had been underway since 2023, which produced a national policy framework presented to Parliament in early 2026. Whether the corridor conditions would survive legal challenge from developers, and whether they would be consistently applied across all future approvals, remained open questions when the policy framework was tabled.

What the Corridors Mean in Practice

The practical implications of access corridor conditions depend heavily on their specifics. A narrow, poorly maintained, and inadequately signposted passage through hotel grounds is legally an access corridor. It is not necessarily a meaningful or welcoming invitation to the public. Critics of the initial conditions noted that the approvals in Trelawny and St Ann did not specify minimum corridor widths, maintenance obligations, signage standards, security arrangements, or the hours during which the corridors would be available. These details, advocates argued, were precisely the issues that had allowed previous access commitments to be honoured in letter but not in spirit.

Supporters countered that the presence of a condition at all was a meaningful precedent. Once a condition is embedded in a planning approval, it becomes a legally enforceable obligation. A hotel that blocks or closes its access corridor can be required to reopen it. The NEPA and the relevant municipal corporation have enforcement powers, though using them against a major investor requires political will that has historically been inconsistent. What the 2025 conditions created, at minimum, was a legal lever that did not previously exist for these specific sites.

The Broader Investment Picture

The North Coast resort pipeline remains substantial. The Jamaica Tourist Board has tracked a multi-year expansion in planned room capacity along the Trelawny, St Ann, and St James coastlines, driven by international chain investors as well as Jamaica-based developers. The introduction of access conditions does not appear to have significantly deterred investment interest: the Trelawny projects subject to the new requirements proceeded to advanced planning stages, and no developers publicly withdrew applications in response to the corridor requirements.

That investor response is significant. One of the arguments historically made against beach access requirements was that they would deter investment by reducing the exclusivity premium that all-inclusive resorts depend on for their business model. The evidence from the 2025 approvals cycle is that this deterrent effect, at least for corridor requirements, is limited. Investors appear to have concluded that a public access path through their grounds, correctly managed, is a political and regulatory necessity that does not fundamentally compromise the guest experience inside their compound.

Whether that calculation holds as access requirements become more demanding — if, for instance, future policy requires not merely a path through resort grounds but active amenity provision for public beach users — remains to be seen. The 2025 corridor conditions represented a beginning, not a settlement. But for the communities on Jamaica’s North Coast who have been arguing for decades that new hotels should not come with locked gates, the change was real enough to notice.

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