- $4.2 billion facilitated through JAMPRO this fiscal year
- 8,943 new rooms and 25,705 jobs projected
- 10% of the pipeline is delayed
- A 2019-announced Marriott project still isn’t built
Jamaica has facilitated more than US$4.2 billion in hotel investments through JAMPRO in the fiscal year ending March 2026, expected to deliver 8,943 new rooms and roughly 25,705 jobs, according to Government of Jamaica filings submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Roughly 10 percent of that pipeline remains delayed, including a Marriott-branded property in Trelawny.
That delay has a specific, traceable history. Amaterra Group signed a hotel management agreement with Marriott International in November 2019 for an 800-room, all-inclusive resort on Amaterra’s roughly 1,000-acre Trelawny site, part of a larger township development ultimately planned for 8,000 rooms. Construction was expected to begin in the first quarter of 2020, with completion targeted for 2022. As of the 2026 filings, the flagship Marriott property from that agreement still has not been completed, six years after the deal was announced and four years past its original completion target.
The Marriott delay sits alongside several other large, still-incomplete projects anchoring the current pipeline. Harmony Cove, a US$1 billion, 1,600-room integrated resort also in Trelawny, has been in various stages of planning for more than a decade and has only recently received provisional approval to begin ground works. Moon Palace Phase 2, valued at US$700 million with 1,350 rooms, is still going through the approval process, with resort design and building plans not yet finalised. Grand Palladium Phase II, a US$569 million, 948-room Hanover expansion, remains under government review as well.
Hurricane Melissa complicates any reading of these delays. The storm took approximately 6,200 rooms out of circulation at the end of 2025, damaging major hotels across Montego Bay, Negril, Ocho Rios and the south coast, meaning some slippage in an already-delayed pipeline is now genuinely storm-related rather than purely a planning or financing failure. But the Amaterra-Marriott timeline predates Melissa by years, its original 2022 target came and went with no storm to explain the gap, which means at least part of Jamaica’s delayed hotel pipeline was already behind schedule before the hurricane gave the sector a fresh, more sympathetic excuse.
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