Ask ten travel writers where the all-inclusive resort began and you’ll probably hear, “Club Med in Europe.” Ask a Jamaican, and you’ll get a very different story. Our version runs through Port Antonio and Ocho Rios, through great houses and sugar estates, through a Kingston businessman called Abe Issa and a cove in Portland that once included helicopter time in the weekly rate.
When you zoom out, it becomes clear: Jamaica didn’t just copy the all-inclusive idea. Jamaica reinvented it, grounded it in our coastline and culture, then exported that model to the world. And that story is impossible to tell without talking about land – who owned it, who was locked out, and how tourism turned beachfront property into the most coveted real estate on the island.
From Sugar Estate to Resort Strip
For most of Jamaica’s colonial history, land wasn’t about leisure. It was about sugar. After the British took the island from Spain in 1655, they carved it up into estates, importing enslaved Africans to work the cane fields and building great houses on the hills to watch over everything.
Land ownership was brutally simple: a small class of planters controlled vast tracts; everyone else laboured on them. Even after emancipation in 1838, ex-slaves struggled to buy land. Planters often refused to sell, or asked impossibly high prices for tiny plots.
Over time, cracks appeared in that system. Sugar prices fell in the late 1800s and early 1900s; some estates collapsed and portions were sold off to small farmers and emerging Jamaican entrepreneurs. Bit by bit, the pattern of ownership began shifting from purely plantation to a mix of estates, peasant freeholds, and urban subdivisions.
By the mid-20th century, a new form of land use was quietly taking shape along the north coast: tourism real estate. Instead of planting cane, investors were buying old estates, coastal strips and coves to plant something else entirely—hotels, villas and bungalows for foreign visitors. Much of Jamaica’s tourism development would cluster along this north-coast ribbon, from Montego Bay through Ocho Rios and on to Port Antonio and Negril.
Frenchman’s Cove: All-Inclusive for the 1%
The first real glimpse of what we’d now call an all-inclusive resort didn’t come from a big global chain. It came from a tiny, ultra-exclusive property in Portland: Frenchman’s Cove.
Construction on Frenchman’s Cove started in the late 1950s. By the time it opened its first full season in 1962, it was being described as “Jamaica’s first all-inclusive resort” – and, in many accounts, the first all-inclusive hotel in the Caribbean and possibly the world.
This wasn’t budget tourism. It was a playground for the ultra-rich:
- 18 luxury villas and a great house scattered across 42 acres of lush coastal land.
- A two-week minimum stay.
- A flat weekly rate that covered everything – food, drink, staff, and even use of a helicopter for guests arriving or touring from Kingston.
Frenchman’s Cove’s guest list read like a Who’s Who of the 1960s: Queen Elizabeth II, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, The Beatles, Marlon Brando, Ian Fleming.
From a real-estate angle, Frenchman’s Cove is fascinating. A former estate on a secluded bay becomes a gated bubble: a private beach, private river, private villas. It set a template—prime coastal land turned into a self-contained world where the guest never needs to leave. That’s textbook all-inclusive logic, decades before the phrase became mainstream.
But Frenchman’s Cove was a boutique experiment, a luxury outlier. It didn’t yet answer a bigger question: What would it look like to take that “everything included” idea and scale it for ordinary couples on honeymoon or anniversary, not just royalty and film stars?
Abe Issa, Tower Isle and the Birth of Couples
To answer that, you have to drive west along the north coast to Ocho Rios and stop at a hotel that changed Jamaican tourism: Tower Isle.
In 1949, Jamaican businessman Abraham “Abe” Issa opened the Tower Isle Hotel, recognised in official histories as Jamaica’s first year-round resort. It stood on a headland with its own private island just offshore – a perfect stage for a new kind of Jamaican luxury.
Issa wasn’t just a hotelier. He later became the first chairman of the Jamaica Tourism Board and a leading voice in positioning Jamaica as a destination in its own right. Importantly, his hotels were among the first to welcome Black Jamaican guests, breaking colonial-era racial barriers in hospitality.
By the 1970s, Issa had been watching international travel trends—especially the success of European package holidays and the early experiments in all-inclusive pricing. He had a simple but radical idea:
What if a couple could pay once, land in Jamaica, and not have to think about money again until they were boarding the plane home?
In 1978, he turned that idea into reality. Tower Isle was reborn as Couples Ocho Rios, the world’s first fully all-inclusive, couples-only resort, bundling accommodation, unlimited food and drink, watersports, and even excursions like Dunn’s River Falls into a single prepaid price.
For Jamaican real estate, this was a pivot point. Land on the north coast was no longer just a site for a hotel; it was the foundation of an ecosystem:
- Waterfront frontage became the premium commodity, allowing private islands, coves and beaches to be locked into a single branded experience.
- On-site amenities – tennis courts, golf access, marina space – turned large landholdings into multi-use resorts where every square metre could generate value.
- Excursion rights – partnerships for waterfalls, rivers and neighbouring attractions – extended the resort’s “territory” beyond its physical boundary.
Couples wasn’t inventing land itself, but it was inventing a new way to monetise land through hospitality, where every coconut tree and coral head could be woven into an “all included” promise.
From Camps to Caribbean: Why Jamaica’s Version Matters
It’s true that Jamaica didn’t dream up the idea of a pre-paid holiday from scratch. British holiday camps like Butlin’s were offering fixed-price accommodation, meals and entertainment from the 1930s, and Club Méditerranée (Club Med) launched its tent-village concept in 1950 in Majorca, selling a single price for beach huts, communal dining and sports.
But those early European models felt more like camps than resorts: shared facilities, basic lodging, limited luxury. Jamaica’s contribution was to take that skeletal concept and flesh it out with romance, privacy and a distinctly Caribbean sense of escape.
Think about the difference:
- At Frenchman’s Cove, the all-inclusive promise wrapped itself around a secluded cove, private villas and lush gardens – not just a dining hall and playing field.
- At Couples, the idea expanded further: king-size beds steps from the sea, candlelit dinners, premium bar, catamaran cruises, spa treatments, golf, all designed around two people who came to reconnect.
The land made this possible:
- Deep-blue bays for catamarans and scuba.
- Wide beaches for wedding gazebos and beach dinners.
- Hillside lots for sea-view suites and cliff-edge pools.
Where Club Med turned leftover army tents into holidays, Jamaica turned former sugar lands and coastal estates into immersive, landscaped experiences. The island effectively localised and upgraded the all-inclusive to fit a tropical, aspirational, romance-driven market.
That’s why, by the time big travel magazines write about the sector today, you’ll often see lines like “Jamaica may not have invented the all-inclusive, but it has certainly perfected it.”
Tourism and the New Jamaican Property Map
Once Couples proved the concept, other brands accelerated the transformation of the coast.
In the early 1980s, Sandals opened its first resort in Montego Bay, also using an adults-only, all-inclusive model and rapidly expanding into Negril, Ocho Rios and the south coast. Family-oriented brands like Beaches followed, adding waterparks and kids’ clubs to the formula.
The result on the ground was a new geography of Jamaican real estate:
- Resort belts
- Long strips of coast—from Montego Bay’s Gloucester Avenue, through Runaway Bay, to Negril’s Seven Mile Beach—fill up with hotels, villas and gated resort communities, turning beachfront property into some of the most expensive land in the country.
- Ancillary development inland
- Staff housing, supply depots, local guest houses and rental homes begin clustering a few miles inland, introducing new demand for residential subdivisions and commercial plazas.
- Mixed-use resort real estate
- The modern trend toward condo-hotels, villa resorts and branded residences builds on that same all-inclusive DNA: owners buy a unit, which the operator manages as part of an all-inclusive hotel when they’re not in residence. This blends investment property, second home and hotel room into one asset.
- Short-term rental boom
- With platforms like Airbnb, local and diaspora owners are carving out their own mini all-inclusive experiences—bundling accommodation with airport transfers, home-cooked meals and tour guiding—especially in hotspots like Kingston, Ocho Rios and Negril.
So the same logic that turned Tower Isle into Couples—buy the right land, package everything around it and sell a feeling, not just a room—now underpins a big slice of Jamaican real estate, from mega-resorts down to two-bedroom sea-view apartments.
The Shadow Side: Enclaves and Access
Of course, the story isn’t all sunshine and rum punch. When prime coastal land is wrapped inside gates and sold as “all-inclusive,” it raises hard questions about access and equity.
- Many of the island’s best beaches sit behind resort fences, with public access limited or routed through narrow corridors.
- Traditional fishing communities sometimes find themselves squeezed between resort frontages and marine parks.
- Land values in nearby areas can rise faster than local incomes, putting pressure on renters and first-time buyers.
These tensions go right back to Jamaica’s historic land story: who gets to live on the coast, who gets pushed inland, and who gets to profit when a former sugar estate becomes a world-class resort.
Policymakers have responded with a mix of environmental regulations, beach access policies and investment incentives, trying to keep the tourism engine running while avoiding complete coastal lock-off. It’s an ongoing balancing act, and one that every new all-inclusive or mixed-use project has to navigate.
So, Did Jamaica Invent the Modern All-Inclusive?
If we’re being strict, the very first pre-paid holidays in history probably belong to European camps and early package tours. But if you’re talking about the modern all-inclusive beach resort – the one people picture when they say, “I’m going to an all-inclusive in the Caribbean” – the evidence points squarely at Jamaica.
- Frenchman’s Cove took the idea of “everything included” and wrapped it around a secluded tropical bay, pioneering the fully inclusive luxury hotel stay in the early 1960s.
- Couples Ocho Rios (Tower Isle) then democratised that idea in 1978: not just for royalty and movie stars, but for ordinary couples who could save, book, and know that one price covered romance, dining, drinks, sports and excursions.
- That Jamaican template spread through brands like Sandals, SuperClubs, and later international chains, turning the north coast into a living showroom for the all-inclusive lifestyle.
In that sense, Jamaica didn’t just join a global trend—it redefined its centre of gravity, proving that a small island, with a complicated land history, could use its coastlines to rewrite the rules of holiday-making.
The Next Chapter: Beyond the Gate
Today, the conversation around Jamaican real estate and all-inclusive resorts is shifting again. New investment projects are talking more about:
- Community linkages – sourcing food from local farms, hiring and training from nearby communities.
- Sustainability and blue economy – protecting reefs, mangroves and beaches that make the all-inclusive promise possible in the first place.
- Hybrid models – where resort living blends with residential ownership, so that Jamaicans and visitors share the same master-planned spaces rather than existing in separate worlds.
If the 20th century was about turning sugar estates into resort strips, the 21st may be about turning resort strips into integrated coastal communities that work for investors, tourists and locals. And if history is any guide, Jamaica will again be in the vanguard—experimenting, adapting and exporting whatever model works.
Because that’s really the heart of it. Jamaica’s genius wasn’t just putting food and drink on one bill. It was taking centuries of complicated land history, a stretch of dazzling coastline and a deep instinct for hospitality, and weaving them into a new kind of property: the modern all-inclusive resort.
The world copied the look. The world copied the business model. But the original flavour?
That will always be Jamaican.
Disclaimer:
This article is for informational and educational purposes only. While every effort has been made to ensure accuracy, historical accounts and real estate details may vary across sources. This post does not constitute legal, financial, or professional advice. Readers should conduct their own research or consult qualified professionals before making decisions related to travel, investment, or property. The views expressed are general in nature and are not intended to represent any official position of any organisation.