Marriott Brings Its First All-Inclusive Flag To Montego Bay

Kingston, Jamaica, 24 August 2026. Marriott International has signed an agreement to convert the former Catalonia Montego Bay into a 522-room Marriott Hotels All-Inclusive Resort, bringing the Marriott Hotels brand to the all-inclusive segment in Jamaica for the first time. The beachfront property, located near Sangster International Airport, is expected to reopen in 2028 following a full renovation and repositioning.

From Holiday Inn to Marriott flagship

The property has changed hands and names more than once. Originally the Holiday Inn SunSpree Resort, it was acquired by Spain’s Catalonia Hotels & Resorts in May 2024 and rebranded as Catalonia Montego Bay. It closed following Hurricane Melissa and had already been slated for a major refurbishment before Thursday’s announcement, made jointly in Barcelona by Marriott and Catalonia, confirmed the property’s next chapter. Plans call for 522 guest rooms, 13 dining venues, three swimming pools, close to 13,000 square feet of meeting space, a spa, fitness centre, tennis and pickleball courts, a lazy river and more than 2,100 feet of beachfront.

The Montego Bay deal is one half of a dual agreement. The second brings an Autograph Collection all-inclusive resort to Zanzibar, Tanzania, underlining how aggressively Marriott is expanding its all-inclusive portfolio across multiple continents at once, and how competitive Jamaica now is for that global attention.

Why the brand matters as much as the rooms

Montego Bay is already saturated with international resort brands, and a new flag alone would not be remarkable. What makes this deal notable is that it introduces Marriott Hotels, the company’s flagship brand, to the all-inclusive category in Jamaica for the first time, joining Marriott’s existing all-inclusive presence elsewhere in the Caribbean and Latin America. For Jamaica’s tourism economy, that brand recognition tends to translate into distribution advantages, loyalty-programme traffic and a pricing ceiling that independent or lesser-known operators struggle to match.

What it means for property owners and investors on the north coast

A major branded conversion tends to have ripple effects well beyond the resort’s own fence line. Hospitality investment of this scale typically supports demand for staff housing, service businesses and ancillary commercial space in the surrounding area, and a confirmed opening date gives nearby landowners and developers a fixed point around which to plan their own timelines. St James has already seen a wave of branded and independent resort activity in recent years, and a Marriott flagship arriving in 2028 adds further weight to the case that Montego Bay’s hospitality real estate cycle still has room to run.

For investors specifically eyeing branded residential product, hotel conversions of this profile are often followed, though not guaranteed, by adjacent branded villa or condominium components once the flagship property is established and performing. That is not confirmed for this project, but it is a pattern worth watching as details of the redevelopment firm up.

A market still absorbing Hurricane Melissa

It is worth noting the property closed after Hurricane Melissa, a reminder that even a headline-grabbing branded conversion sits within a north coast hospitality sector still working through storm recovery and resilience upgrades. A 2028 opening gives Catalonia and Marriott a multi-year runway to rebuild to a higher standard, and the timeline itself says something about how seriously international operators are treating storm resilience as part of a modern renovation rather than an afterthought.

Looking ahead

Marriott’s decision to anchor a new all-inclusive flagship in Montego Bay, at the same time it is building a comparable resort in Zanzibar, signals that the company sees continued growth in the all-inclusive category and specifically in Jamaica as a destination worth committing capital to years in advance. For the north coast property market, the practical question now shifts to execution: whether the 2028 timeline holds, and how much of the surrounding real estate activity it pulls along with it.

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