Kingston, Jamaica, 5 April 2026
Six months after Hurricane Melissa, a consistent message has emerged from business owners across the western parishes who have been through the process of making insurance claims: do not count on the payout to fund your restart. Have cash reserves. Have a financial buffer. Because even when an insurance policy is valid, the claim is covered and the adjuster has visited the property, the payout may be months away while the business sits idle, staff go without wages and the window for recovery narrows.
The advice is practical and, for many small businesses across St Elizabeth and the neighbouring western parishes, it arrives too late to be useful. The businesses that needed cash reserves most were often those with the least capacity to maintain them. A small restaurant, a coastal tour operator, a craft vendor or a guesthouse owner operating at the margins of profitability before the storm had no financial buffer to absorb months of trading loss while an insurance claim was processed. Those businesses have not been waiting for insurance. Many of them have not survived.
The Structural Problem with Post-Disaster Insurance
The insurance industry’s response to Melissa has exposed structural weaknesses that are not unique to Jamaica but are particularly acute in a small economy where most businesses are either underinsured or uninsured, and where the minority that do hold policies face claim processes that are operationally ill-equipped for the scale of a Category 5 event. Shortages of qualified adjusters, disrupted infrastructure making site visits difficult, rising rebuilding costs that complicate settlement negotiations, complex business interruption claims that require forensic accounting, and weak regulatory oversight of claim processing timelines have all contributed to the backlog.
Tourism and small businesses in Montego Bay and the western corridor suffered acute losses during and after the storm, with reported sales down significantly in the months that followed. Many operations in Black River, Treasure Beach and the south coast corridor that depend on the ecosystem of tourism, accommodation, tours and food have had to fund their own recovery, from savings, from family remittances and from community solidarity. Insurance was the mechanism that was supposed to provide that funding. For many businesses, it did not arrive in time to be the mechanism it was supposed to be.
The Property Market Consequence
For Jamaica’s commercial property sector, the experience of post-Melissa insurance claims is relevant beyond the individual business level. Properties whose insurance claims are unresolved months after a major hurricane cannot be sold, refinanced or repositioned in the market. Owners who need to liquidate assets to fund rebuilding elsewhere are trapped by the uncertainty of pending claims. Landlords who need insurance settlements to fund tenant improvements or lease incentives that would attract replacement businesses to damaged premises cannot move forward. The delays in the commercial insurance market compound the already severe disruption to Black River’s commercial district, and to the property markets of every town that sustained significant business losses in October 2025.
The Financial Services Commission and the government have both been called upon to act: to impose minimum service standards on claim processing timelines, to require transparent communication between insurers and policyholders, and to build into future insurance regulation the lessons that Melissa has made impossible to ignore. Jamaican businesses, and the property interests they occupy and anchor, cannot afford for the next major storm to produce the same outcome. Cash under the mattress is not an insurance policy. It is what the absence of a functioning one looks like.
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