Who Owns the Rooms?

Against these numbers, Sandals is a boutique. With about 6,150 rooms across 18 resorts, the figure Royal Caribbean cited when it announced its deal, Marriott has roughly 283 rooms for every one Sandals operates. Yet Sandals is unusual in one respect that matters for Jamaica: it owns its hotels. “We remain asset heavy today and into the future,” Adam Stewart, its executive chairman, said after the Royal Caribbean announcement. The Spanish family chains are similar. They build, own and run their resorts, which is why they show up so clearly on the ground in Jamaica, while the American brands often do not.

The Spanish Coast

The Spanish arrival began in earnest in 2001, when Riu opened its first Jamaican hotel. By the end of 2018, according to figures released in 2019 by Marc Meister of SERGAT, Jamaica’s tourism representative office for Spain and Portugal, 13 Spanish hotels held nearly 7,100 rooms, or 28.4 per cent of the 25,000 rooms in Jamaica’s 203 hotels. Six of the ten largest hotels on the island were Spanish.

The list has grown since. Princess Hotels and Resorts, also founded in Spain, opened two resorts at Green Island in Hanover in late 2024 with 1,005 rooms between them: 590 suites at Princess Grand Jamaica and 415 at Princess Senses The Mangrove. The group put the investment at more than US$400 million, the largest it has made in any country. H10 Hotels, from Barcelona, operates 957 rooms across Ocean Coral Spring and Ocean Eden Bay in Trelawny. In February 2025, Palladium Hotel Group, part of the Matutes family’s Grupo Empresas Matutes in Ibiza, broke ground on a €500 million expansion in Hanover that is to add 950 rooms beside its existing 1,056 room Grand Palladium. It was reported at the time that Spanish investors had put more than €2 billion into Jamaican tourism.

Why There Is No Honest Top 100

That table has ten rows rather than a hundred for a reason. No public body in Jamaica publishes hotel ownership. The Jamaica Tourist Board’s Annual Travel Statistics count rooms by resort area, by size and by whether a hotel is all inclusive, but not by who owns it. Companies publish room counts at openings and rarely update them. Hotels change hands through holding companies and investment platforms abroad, and the brand on the gate often belongs to a management company that owns no bricks at all.

Even the size of the national stock is a moving target. The tourism board counted 24,142 hotel rooms in 207 hotels at the end of 2017, plus 3,829 guesthouse rooms, 3,162 in resort villas and 718 in apartments. In December 2023, ahead of a ministry commissioned impact study, the stock across all accommodation types was put at roughly 31,510 rooms. Then Hurricane Melissa struck on 28 October 2025. By the official count only 64 per cent of hotel inventory was open when the winter season began on 15 December, and in September 2026 Phillip Rose, the Jamaica Tourist Board’s deputy director of tourism for the Americas, said about 70 per cent of the affected rooms were back, with “over 11,000 more rooms coming back on stream between 2026 and 2027”. The month by month list published with that statement accounts for only about 5,800 of them.

For these reasons Jamaica Homes News does not publish a single ownership share for the whole island. Where we give a share, we say what it is measured against and from which year.

Myth Check: “The Spaniards Own a Third”

One number circulates more than any other: that Spanish companies own a third of Jamaica’s hotel rooms. In its original form it was slightly overstated. The 2019 figure from SERGAT was 28.4 per cent, and some reports at the time rounded it up to a third. Since then the Spanish footprint has grown. Adding only the five Spanish groups with published counts, Riu, Bahia Principe, Palladium, Princess and H10, gives 8,667 rooms. Set against the 25,000 hotel rooms counted at the end of 2018, that would be about 35 per cent, but the comparison flatters the share: at least 2,200 of those Spanish rooms opened after 2018, while the 2018 total does not include them. On a like for like basis the share is probably close to 30 per cent, before Iberostar’s three Rose Hall hotels, Meliá’s Braco property, Catalonia and Excellence are counted at all.

A second popular number needs checking too: that Jamaica keeps only 15 or 20 cents of every tourism dollar. That figure is the Tourism Minister’s estimate for the Caribbean region as a whole. For Jamaica itself, Edmund Bartlett said in May 2026 that retention is “somewhere close to 40 per cent”, behind only the Dominican Republic in the region, and set a target of 50 to 60 per cent. The Jamaica Tourist Board’s investor outlook uses the same figure, about 40 per cent. Neither the ministry nor the board has published the study behind it, so it should be read as an official estimate.

How Jamaican Capital Swapped Hotels for Shares

The clearest case of local ownership flowing outward is one most Jamaicans never noticed. In 2018, Playa Hotels and Resorts, a company listed in New York, bought a portfolio of Jamaican resorts from Sagicor, including the Hilton Rose Hall and several Jewel properties. It paid with 20 million of its own shares and about US$100 million in cash, a deal reported at more than US$300 million. One of Jamaica’s largest financial groups became a shareholder in an American hotel company instead of a direct owner of Jamaican beachfront.

Then the chain moved again. Hyatt bought Playa outright for US$13.50 a share in June 2025, a deal valued at about US$2.6 billion. Six months later, on 30 December 2025, Hyatt sold the owned real estate, 14 resorts in Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica, to Tortuga Resorts, a platform formed by the American private equity firm KSL Capital Partners and Rodina, a Mexican family office, for a total of about US$2 billion, keeping 50 year contracts to manage 13 of them. Jamaican beachfront that a Jamaican financial group owned in 2017 thus passed, through several layers, to a New York listed company, then to Hyatt, and finally to Tortuga, with an American brand on the gate under a management contract that will outlast most of the people who work there.

The Sandals Exception, and Its Limits

Gordon “Butch” Stewart built Sandals from a single Montego Bay hotel into the region’s best known resort company, and it remains the largest Jamaican founded hotel group by a distance. Its own list shows seven Sandals resorts in Jamaica plus Beaches Negril, with a new Beaches announced for Runaway Bay; several, including Sandals Montego Bay, Sandals Royal Caribbean and Sandals South Coast, were still closed for post Melissa rebuilding in September 2026. The older Jamaican families are still present too. Couples Resorts, owned by the House of Issa, runs four resorts on the north coast; Abraham Issa, its founder, was the first chairman of the Jamaica Tourist Board in 1955.

But the Royal Caribbean deal changes the arithmetic. Under the terms filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Royal Caribbean Group will hold a 50 per cent equity interest in Sandals and Beaches, at a valuation of about ten times forward EBITDA, with the board jointly led by Mr Stewart and Jason Liberty, Royal Caribbean’s chief executive. The deal is expected to close in early 2027. Mr Stewart has said that “Sandals remains Sandals”, that the business takes on no new debt, and that it plans about 7,000 new jobs as it expands beyond the Caribbean. Supporters of the deal argue it gives a Jamaican company the capital to compete with groups many times its size. Sceptics note that Jamaica’s flagship hotel brand will, if the deal closes, be half owned by the cruise industry, whose ships compete with hotels for the same holidaymaker. Mr Stewart’s answer is that management and brands stay intact, and Royal Caribbean has said it will not consolidate Sandals into its own accounts.

Mexico Moves In

The second foreign wave is Mexican. Palace Resorts, owned by the Chapur family of Cancún, made Jamaica its first venture outside Mexico when it opened Moon Palace Jamaica in Ocho Rios in 2015; the hotel has more than 700 rooms, and the minister announced in October 2024 that the group would build 1,350 more in Montego Bay. RCD Hotels, the Mexican group that develops Hard Rock resorts, has one of the most ambitious projects on the island: a three phase site in Montego Bay combining the 451 room UNICO hotel, a 1,100 room Hard Rock Hotel and 250 DOMA residences, with capital spending put at US$756.9 million in a Jampro table in the government’s 2025/26 annual report, as reported in August 2026. Cabinet has approved the integrated resort, though a casino still needs separate approvals.

The pipeline shows how lopsided the expansion is. Of the 11,155 rooms the tourism board listed in February 2026, more than half are in and around Montego Bay. Kingston has one project: a 400 room Wyndham hotel at the Courtleigh. Some numbers in the list disagree with other official statements. The board lists 2,000 rooms for Harmony Cove in Trelawny, while the government’s own information service described the project in July 2025 as 1,000 luxury rooms, a casino and more than US$1 billion of investment on about 2,300 acres held through the state company Harmonisation Limited in partnership with Tavistock Group.

The Caribbean League Table

Jamaica is not the region’s largest hotel market, and the gap explains much of the competition for investors. Quintana Roo, the Mexican state that contains Cancún, had 137,937 hotel rooms in August 2025 according to its tourism secretariat, and says it is closing in on Las Vegas. The Dominican Republic ended 2025 with a little over 93,000 hotel rooms, on figures presented by the economist Nassim Alemany, and the hotel association Asonahores had already put the total above 90,000 in April 2025. Spanish chains now expanding in Jamaica helped build both markets.

On those figures Quintana Roo has more than four rooms for every one in Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic nearly three. At the end of 2023 Jamaica was nonetheless the region’s second busiest building site. A 2024 market report by the valuation firm IRR counted 4,279 Jamaican rooms in final planning or under construction at the end of 2023, behind only the Dominican Republic with 8,597.

Why Big Resorts Win

The tourism board’s own statistics show why the ownership map keeps concentrating. In 2021, a pandemic year when occupancy everywhere was depressed, hotels with more than 200 rooms ran at 50.6 per cent occupancy, while hotels with fewer than 50 rooms managed 19.8 per cent. All inclusive hotels filled 49.3 per cent of their rooms; the rest filled 21.8 per cent. Yet according to the 2019 SERGAT figures, more than half of Jamaica’s hotels have fewer than 50 rooms. Most rooms, and the strongest occupancy, sit in a relatively small number of very large resorts, and the largest of those are run by the groups in the table above.

What This Means for Jamaica

For property owners and buyers, the hotel map is a land map. Each large resort needs hundreds of acres of coast, and increasingly it needs housing too. Princess said it would provide 600 free homes for staff at Green Island; Palladium’s Hanover expansion includes 550 staff housing units. These are substantial private housing schemes for western Jamaica, and they are being built by hotel companies, not housing developers. Land within commuting distance of the new resort belts in Hanover, Trelawny and St James is being priced on the assumption that the rooms will come.

The policy argument divides along familiar lines. The government’s case is that foreign capital has built rooms Jamaica could not finance alone, and that every large resort brings jobs (the tourism board estimated 1.4 employees per hotel room in 2021) plus contracts for local farmers and builders. The opposing case is that the incentives granted to large foreign projects tilt the field against Jamaican owners, that too much of the earnings leaves the island, and that the industry’s recovery after Melissa should be used to widen local ownership. The minister himself has said that “the wealth of tourism is in the supply side”, meaning the food, transport and other goods and services that hotels buy, which is where he wants more Jamaican ownership.

The Question Behind the Rooms

Tourism earned Jamaica about US$4.33 billion in 2024 and US$3.79 billion in the storm year of 2025. The rooms that earn it will soon be split between Spanish families from Mallorca and Ibiza, Mexican groups from Cancún, American and Mexican private capital, a half American Sandals and a long tail of small Jamaican hotels. The Dominican Republic and Mexico made the same bargain earlier and on a larger scale. What is unusual is how little of it is visible to Jamaicans, because no register brings the ownership of the island’s most valuable coastline together in one place.

A country can rent out its rooms and still own its future. The test is whether it knows who holds the keys, and what it is asking in return.

Method: Room counts come from company announcements (Riu, Princess Hotels and Resorts), the Jamaica Information Service, SERGAT figures released in 2019, the Jamaica Tourist Board’s FAQs, Annual Travel Statistics 2021 and Investor Outlook (February 2026), the Ministry of Tourism, HOTELS magazine’s 2026 ranking of hotel companies (2025 data), the MKG world ranking, Royal Caribbean Group’s filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Hyatt’s announcement of the Tortuga sale, the IRR Caribbean Hospitality Market Report (first quarter 2024), the Quintana Roo Secretariat of Tourism and Asonahores. Reports by the Gleaner, the Jamaica Observer, Caribbean Journal, TravelPulse, Hotel Dive, Riviera Maya News and elDinero were used for facts. The Spanish share is a Jamaica Homes News estimate: the latest published counts of five groups set against the 2018 hotel stock give an upper bound of about 35 per cent, and nearer 30 per cent like for like; it excludes groups that do not publish counts. Room counts for Sandals in Jamaica, Iberostar and Couples are not published and are not estimated here. Caribbean comparisons use different definitions and dates, as shown on each chart. Retention of about 40 per cent is an official estimate; the underlying study has not been published.