Little Palm Island Resort & Spa Review: America's Only Private Island Resort

The motor yacht leaves the shore station at Little Torch Key at Mile Marker 28.5 on the Overseas Highway and crosses three miles of the Florida Straits to an island that is, in several respects, unlike anything else available to a guest arriving on a commercial flight in the United States. Four and a half acres. Thirty bungalow suites. No televisions in any of them. No audible mobile phones anywhere on the property. No children under eighteen. Complimentary watersports including four Boston Whalers that guests may take independently to the sandbars and reefs of the lower Keys. A restaurant — the Dining Room — that the Michelin Guide has awarded three keys and that non-guests may visit by dinner reservation. A spa that the returning guests describe in the specific language of people who came for the treatments and left having been changed by the setting.

Little Palm Island has been a destination since before it was a resort. Harry Truman used the island as a retreat during his presidency. A movie set here in 1962 brought electricity to the island’s shores. A brief period in the 1980s saw it serve as a staging post for cocaine shipments before the current ownership established the resort in its initial form. Hurricane Irma’s damage in 2017 prompted the complete renovation that reopened in 2020 and produced the thirty-suite configuration that exists today — a property that Travel + Leisure ranked number one resort in Florida in 2024, that the Michelin Guide has designated with three keys, and that Condé Nast Traveller has placed in its top ten for the Florida Keys across consecutive years. These are not minor accolades, and in the case of Little Palm Island they are not the inflated designations that luxury resort marketing sometimes produces. The island earns them.

The Arrival

The arrival at Little Palm Island is an event in a way that the arrival at most resorts — a lobby, a check-in desk, a room key — is not. The shore station at Little Torch Key is where the car is parked and left behind. A welcome cocktail — the Gumby Slumber, a rum and coconut preparation that has become the island’s calling card — is pressed into the hand of arriving guests while the motor yacht is prepared. The yacht crosses the three miles to the island in approximately fifteen minutes, circling the resort on approach so that the four-and-a-half acres are visible in full — the thatched bungalows beneath the palms, the white sand, the saltwater pool visible above the beach, the dining room’s thatched roof rising above the vegetation — before the dock is reached and the island entered for the first time.

For guests who want the arrival by seaplane — Tropic Ocean Airways operates from South Florida airports and lands at the island’s dock — the aerial approach over the lower Keys, with the reef system visible in the clear water below and the island resolving from the chain of mangrove keys as the approach is made, is its own form of theatre and one that the motor yacht cannot replicate.

The Suites

Thirty bungalow suites in four categories distribute across the island’s four and a half acres, screened from each other by tropical planting in a design that produces privacy between neighbouring suites that the island’s size might appear to preclude. The Island Escape Suites are the entry category — five hundred and fifty square feet with vaulted thatched ceilings, oceanfront decks, and bathrooms of mother-of-pearl tile. The Island Romance Suites add the features that the island is most associated with: outdoor copper soaking tubs, private fire pits, and the specific experience of lying in a bath beneath the Florida Keys sky at ten o’clock at night, watching the stars in a darkness that the island’s car-free, low-light environment permits. The Island Grand Suites bring the British West Indies-inspired design language to its most formal expression — clawfoot tubs, teak plantation shutters, ocean-view decks. The Island Premier Suites, two in number, offer a thousand square feet of the finest accommodation available on the island, with heirloom rugs, four-poster beds, two bathrooms, and private beach strips with dedicated fire pits that guests in these suites do not share with the wider property.

No televisions. No alarm clocks. These are not omissions but decisions — the physical expression of an island whose stated motto is “get lost” and whose entire design philosophy is built around removing the distractions rather than multiplying the amenities. Guests who find that they miss the television are not the guests Little Palm Island is designed for, and the natural selection this architecture performs — attracting the guest who came specifically for the absence of screens and keeping away the guest who did not understand what they were booking — is part of what allows the property’s atmosphere to be what it is.

The Dining Room

The Dining Room is the island’s only restaurant and, at the Michelin Guide’s three-key standard, one of the most decorated hotel restaurants in the state of Florida. The kitchen operates a menu built around locally sourced ingredients — Keys fish and seafood, Florida produce, ingredients that the proximity to the sea and the agricultural landscape of South Florida make available at a freshness that the menu’s preparations are designed to honour rather than to obscure. The Dining Room is open to non-guests by dinner reservation — a provision that limits access appropriately given the island’s scale but that allows the restaurant’s quality to be experienced by visitors arriving by the water taxi without requiring an overnight stay.

The culinary package, available as an addition to the room rate, covers all three daily meals at the Dining Room and constitutes, for guests who take it, the closest available approach to an all-inclusive dining structure at the finest resort in Florida. It is not a flat all-inclusive rate — beverages are charged separately, and the package structure differs from the Caribbean all-inclusive model — but for guests whose week will be spent primarily on the island, it removes the daily meal calculation and adds a financial predictability that the room-only rate does not provide.

The Activities

The watersports included in the rate — kayaks, paddleboards, snorkel gear, Hobie Cat sailboats, and the four Boston Whalers available for independent use — give guests access to the lower Keys’ marine environment in a manner that the island’s geographic position, three miles offshore in the Atlantic-Gulf transition zone, makes genuinely productive rather than merely available. The sandbar excursions, where guests take a Whaler to a shallow sandbar in the surrounding waters and spend the afternoon in conditions that require neither a boat captain nor an excursion schedule, are among the most frequently praised activities in any review of the property — a form of self-organised adventure within a luxury context that very few resorts at any price point actually permit.

SpaTerre — the island’s two-storey spa in a thatched-roof complex around an open courtyard with a reflection pond — provides five treatment rooms for the CBD therapies, four-hands massages, facials, and body treatments that constitute the formal spa programme. The outdoor treatment options, including the Madrugada Water Massage conducted at sunrise in the surrounding water, are the experiences that guests describe in the superlative terms that spa experiences rarely produce from people who have been to many of them. The island’s scale means that advance booking of spa treatments is strongly recommended — there are five treatment rooms serving thirty suites, and peak season availability at the massage times guests most want (late morning, late afternoon) is genuinely limited.

Who It’s For

The couple who have stayed at the world’s finest private island resorts — in the Maldives, in the Seychelles, on Lanai — and who want the experience accessible from a domestic flight. The honeymooner for whom the Island Romance Suite with the copper outdoor tub and the private fire pit is the image around which the trip was planned. The guest for whom the absence of televisions, mobile phone noise, and children constitutes the primary luxury rather than the absence of these things being a concession. Any traveller for whom the private Boston Whaler to a sandbar in the afternoon, without a captain or a schedule, is the most appealing single thing a resort has ever offered them.

The Honest Criticism

Rates beginning at approximately $3,000 per night place Little Palm Island in direct comparison with the world’s finest resort destinations — Four Seasons Hualalai, Sensei Lanai, the finest private island properties in the Maldives and Seychelles. At this price level the comparison is fair, and the honest assessment is that Little Palm Island competes credibly in atmosphere, service depth, and setting while conceding the marine environment of the Indian Ocean and the food programme of a property with a larger kitchen operation. Guests who have stayed at the Maldives’ finest overwater properties and at Little Palm Island describe the experiences as different in kind rather than in quality — the Keys’ specific ecology, the American character of the service culture, and the accessibility by domestic flight are genuine differentiators rather than consolations.

The resort fee, which covers motor yacht transfers, watersports, welcome cocktail, and staff gratuities, adds to the room rate and should be confirmed at booking for the current amount. The room-only rate without the culinary package leaves the food and beverage expenditure as a per-item calculation at Dining Room prices — significant, and worth factoring into the total trip budget before departure.

Practical Details

Thirty suites. Adults-only, minimum age eighteen. No televisions, no audible mobile phones. Arrival by motor yacht from shore station at Mile Marker 28.5, or by seaplane via Tropic Ocean Airways. Motor yacht transfers included in resort fee. Culinary package available — covers three daily meals at the Dining Room, confirm current pricing and inclusions at booking. Spa treatments advance reservation strongly recommended. Rates from approximately $3,000 per night. Check the Noble House Hotels website for current rates and the island’s website for the culinary package configuration.