Half Moon Reopened in Months. Hyatt’s Jamaica Resorts Are Still Delayed

• Melissa caused $12.2 billion in damage, over half of GDP
• Half Moon reopened in a phased return by April
• Hyatt pushed its reopening timeline back again
• Tourism sector reached 80% of pre-storm levels

Hurricane Melissa, which struck Jamaica in October 2025, caused an estimated US$12.2 billion in damage, more than half of the country’s gross domestic product, according to figures cited by Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett. The scale of that damage has produced a strikingly uneven recovery across Jamaica’s hotel sector, six months on.

Half Moon, one of Jamaica’s most storied resorts and its highest-rated property by Forbes Travel Guide, closed in October and began a phased reopening on April 2, returning Eclipse at Half Moon’s 57 beachfront rooms and its reimagined Villas to inventory, with its legacy Founders Cove wing to follow later in the year. Owner Guy Steuart III, the resort’s third-generation chairman, framed the return around the wellbeing of the more than 850 team members affected by the storm as much as the physical restoration itself, and the reopening ceremony included tourism-sector milestones like an update that the Tourism Workers Pension Scheme has grown to $6 billion.

Hyatt’s Jamaica properties tell a different story. The company pushed its reopening timeline back again in April, citing additional assessments that provided greater clarity on the scope and required work, a delay the Gleaner noted removes a significant block of rooms from inventory specifically in the Montego Bay and Rose Hall corridors, even as competitors including Riu, Round Hill, Iberostar and Bahia Principe had already reopened by that point.

Bartlett reported the tourism sector had rebounded to more than 80 percent of pre-hurricane arrival levels by early April, driven by properties returning room by room, 660 one day, a little over 200 the next, in his own accounting. That aggregate recovery figure sits over real variation at the property level: some resorts back in six months, others still working through repeated timeline revisions with no firm reopening date, a gap that matters directly to the towns and workers whose income depends on which specific hotel down the road actually reopens first.

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