All-Inclusive Resorts in Bermuda: The Honest Guide
Bermuda is not the Caribbean. This is said every time someone writes about Bermuda and it bears saying again because the confusion costs people money. The island is in the Atlantic Ocean, not the Caribbean Sea — it sits roughly on the same latitude as Savannah, Georgia, eleven hundred kilometres northeast of the Dominican Republic, in a position that gives it weather that is genuinely different from the islands people are usually comparing it to when they book it. The Caribbean in January is warm and dry and predictable. Bermuda in January averages sixteen degrees Celsius, which is pleasant enough if you came for the pastel architecture and the wreck dives and the specific quality of the island’s light, and disappointing if you came expecting to spend the week in the water.
There are no all-inclusive resorts in Bermuda and there never have been. The island’s hotels are small, individually owned or operated by chains that understand the Bermuda visitor — older, affluent, returning rather than first-time — and the all-inclusive format’s premise that the hotel’s food programme is sufficient reason not to leave runs directly against the specific pleasures that Bermuda offers outside its hotels: the fish chowder and dark rum at the White Horse Tavern in St George, the Sunday morning service at the oldest Anglican church in continuous use in the Western Hemisphere, the bicycle ride along the Railway Trail through pink-walled houses with white stepped roofs designed to collect rainwater. Bermuda is a destination whose rewards require leaving your hotel to find them, and the all-inclusive format is architecturally opposed to that instruction.
What Bermuda Actually Offers
The pink sand beaches are real and they are extraordinary — the colour produced by fragments of the red organism Homotrema rubrum mixed into the coral sand, visible at Horseshoe Bay and Warwick Long Bay in the specific morning light when the pink is most vivid and the Atlantic water is that particular clear blue that shallow Bermudian bays produce. The wreck diving is among the finest in the Atlantic — the island’s position on the major shipping lanes has produced three centuries of accumulating wrecks, and visibility is consistently excellent. The food is genuinely good in the way that small island food cultures can be when there is no volume tourism to dilute them: the rockfish chowder, the Bermuda onion soup, the black rum swizzle that the Swizzle Inn has been producing since 1932 and that every visitor to the island will drink and discuss for years afterward.
The question is whether this justifies the cost. Bermuda is expensive in the way that a small island with limited agricultural land, high import costs, a sophisticated local economy with high wages, and a captive visitor market tends to be expensive. A night at The Reefs — the finest property on the island — begins at approximately four hundred dollars in shoulder season and exceeds seven hundred in peak summer. Dinner for two at a mid-range restaurant will reach one hundred and fifty dollars. A week for a couple at the luxury level will cost eight to twelve thousand dollars before flights.
The Reefs Resort and Club
The Reefs is on the South Shore Road in Southampton — a cliff-top position above a private pink sand beach reached by private steps, with fifty-nine rooms and suites that have been looking at the same Atlantic horizon for decades and that carry the particular quality of a property that has been loved over time rather than designed to look as if it has been. There is a difference between a resort with history and a resort with character, and The Reefs has character — the slightly uneven stone paths, the rooms that vary in size rather than being stamped from a single template, the sense that the building grew from the cliff rather than being placed on it. The Modified American Plan — breakfast and dinner included — is the most practical booking approach, covering the expensive meals without locking the guest into a food programme for lunch when the island’s beaches and towns are the more compelling midday option.
The Honest Calculation
Bermuda is correct for the guest who came specifically for what Bermuda offers — the pink sand in the morning light, the wreck dives, the railway trail, the architecture of a British colony that has been doing things its own particular way since 1612 and that has no interest in changing for the convenience of visitors who expected somewhere warmer. It is not correct for the guest who wanted a Caribbean beach holiday at slightly higher than Caribbean prices. Those are different destinations, and treating them as interchangeable because both have turquoise water and colonial history is the error that produces the most disappointed Bermuda visitors.
When to Go
May through September for the warmest water — Bermuda’s beach season, when the Atlantic reaches comfortable swimming temperatures and the island’s outdoor culture is at its most accessible. April and October are for guests who don’t mind cooler evenings and want to avoid the peak summer rates. November through March is for guests who came specifically for the island rather than the beach, and who understand that Bermuda in winter is a specific and genuine pleasure that has nothing to do with lying in the sun.
Book The Reefs Resort and Club direct — Bermuda’s finest boutique resort, on the South Shore cliff above a private pink sand beach.
