All-Inclusive Resorts in Ocho Rios: The Honest Guide

Ocho Rios has the waterfalls. This single fact — that Dunn’s River Falls, one of the Caribbean’s most photographed natural features, is accessible from the resort zone by a thirty-minute drive — is the primary reason that guests who want to experience something of the Jamaican landscape rather than merely to be in it tend to base themselves in Ocho Rios rather than Montego Bay. The falls cascade six hundred metres to the sea through a series of tiered pools, and climbing them — which is done communally, holding hands in chains with other visitors and a guide, in a manner that sounds more organized than it is and is more pleasurable than photographs prepare you for — is the kind of experience that the all-inclusive resort was specifically designed to make you feel guilty about not leaving the property to have. Leave the property. Go to the falls. Come back for dinner.

The Blue Mountains are an hour from Ocho Rios by road — the Blue Mountain peak accessible on foot in a morning hike that leaves in darkness to reach the summit for sunrise over the island — and the coffee estates of the mountain’s lower slopes, where the Blue Mountain coffee that was once described as the world’s finest (before producers learned to market it to a price point that has made it expensive rather than excellent) are still producing beans of genuinely interesting character. Jamaica Inn, one of the most beautiful small hotels in the Caribbean, is in Ocho Rios. GoldenEye — the estate where Ian Fleming wrote every James Bond novel — is nearby. The cultural depth around Ocho Rios rewards the guest who arrives with some curiosity about the island rather than merely a sun lounger preference.

Sandals Royal Plantation

Seventy-four suites on a clifftop above the Caribbean, butler service for every guest, access to all restaurants and facilities at the adjacent Sandals Ochi beach resort without the Royal Plantation’s intimacy being overwhelmed by the larger property’s energy — this is the Sandals all-inclusive applied to a scale that the brand’s other properties have mostly abandoned in favour of the comprehensiveness that comes with size. The Royal Plantation was a different kind of hotel before the Sandals acquisition, and it carries in its architecture the memory of a property designed for a different guest than the all-inclusive format typically serves. The combination of that scale and that history with the Sandals brand’s all-inclusive framework — the unlimited diving, the premium spirits, the butler who knows your name by the second day — produces the most correctly calibrated luxury all-inclusive experience in Jamaica for the couple who wants the intimacy above the comprehensiveness.

Couples Tower Isle

Couples Tower Isle is the only hotel on the only island off the Jamaican coast — a small key offshore from the main property, accessible by boat, that the brand uses as a private beach option for guests who want the specific pleasure of an island of their own for an afternoon. The main property on the coast is the Couples brand’s original Jamaica property, operating since 1978, with the brand’s characteristic all-inclusive comprehensiveness and the specific atmosphere that a property with four decades of repeat guests produces: staff who have been here for twenty years, guests who have been coming for fifteen, and an atmosphere of accumulated affection for a place that requires some explanation if you are new to it but none at all once you have been.

When to Go

December through April for the finest conditions. The Ocho Rios area’s interior landscape — the mountains visible from the coast, the waterfalls, the coffee country — is at its most beautiful after the wet season rains of September and October have refreshed the vegetation and before the peak-season crowds of February and March arrive. November and early December are the least-recommended Ocho Rios months: the wet season is ending, the hurricane risk is passing, but the landscape has not yet fully recovered from the summer’s storms.

Book Sandals Royal Plantation, Ocho Rios direct — Jamaica’s most intimate luxury all-inclusive, with butler service for all seventy-four suites.