Jamaica’s hotel reopening timeline has diverged sharply by parish nearly a year after Hurricane Melissa, with Negril and the south coast trading rooms back into inventory while a cluster of Montego Bay’s Rose Hall properties has been pushed past the coming winter season entirely.

As of September 14, 36 of the 64 resorts tracked by hotel-status monitor Golden Vacays were open, with 16 more carrying confirmed reopening dates running into 2027, according to the tracker’s most recent update. Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett put formal accommodation capacity at roughly 70 per cent as of September 3, with visitor arrivals running closer to 80 per cent of the prior year’s pace, a gap he attributed to villas, apartments and Airbnb properties absorbing demand that hotels cannot currently house. “Airbnb has done the filling in,” Bartlett said, adding that seats on inbound flights have not been the constraint this year; rooms have.

The recovery is uneven by property tier as much as by geography. Half Moon in Montego Bay has returned to full operation, and Royalton Negril, the Hideaway at Royalton Negril and Grand Lido Negril reopened August 25, with Royalton Blue Waters Montego Bay following September 15. On the south coast, SeaGarden Resorts brought back 100 of its 214 rooms on September 1, continuing to operate at partial capacity while reconstruction and an expansion continue around it.

The harder-hit segment sits in the Rose Hall corridor, where seven large all-inclusive properties, including the Hyatt Ziva and Zilara Rose Hall resorts, have had reopening pushed back. Hyatt had previously targeted March 2027; the group now expects a phased return across the first half of 2027, according to Melissa Forbes, the company’s director of sales and marketing, who said the closures are being used to overhaul rooms and public spaces rather than simply restore them. Those seven properties represent a concentration of adults-only and family all-inclusive inventory that will sit out the 2026-27 winter season, the island’s peak booking period. Iberostar’s JOIA Rose Hall, a 295-suite adults-only property, is scheduled to open in the same corridor on December 1, offering some offsetting supply.

The pattern that emerges is a two-speed recovery: Negril and the south coast returning close to pre-storm footing within a year, against a Montego Bay luxury and family segment still working through multi-quarter rebuilds. With winter bookings already firming against limited supply, the properties still shuttered in Rose Hall will shape both room rates and how much of that peak-season demand Jamaica can actually convert into revenue.