How Couples got here
The man who built Jamaica's first year-round resort in 1949, and then chaired the country's tourist board, spent the 1970s working out what a fully prepaid Jamaican holiday should be. What he landed on was narrower than anyone else has tried since, and the company has never left the island or the idea.
Founded 1978 · Ocho Rios, Jamaica · Run from Montego Bay, Jamaica · Last reviewed August 2026
- 1949
Tower Isle, and a hotel that stayed open
Abe Issa opens the Tower Isle Hotel on an undeveloped stretch of the north coast outside Ocho Rios. Jamaican tourism at the time was a winter business: hotels opened for the season and shut. Tower Isle was built to run all year, which sounds like a scheduling detail and was in fact the argument that tourism could be a real industry rather than a few months of trade. Clean modern lines, open-air public rooms and a small private island gave it the glamour the Caribbean was starting to be known for.
- 1955
The first chairman of the Jamaica Tourist Board
Issa becomes the founding chairman of the national tourist board, and spends the following years arguing a particular version of the business: international standards, but Jamaican staff, Jamaican food and Jamaican hospitality rather than an imported hotel experience set down on a beach. The nickname that stuck, Father of Jamaican Tourism, is about this as much as about the hotels.
- 1976
The other side of the family gets there first
His nephew John Issa founds SuperClubs and opens Negril Beach Village, the first hotel on Negril's beach and an early all-inclusive in its own right. The two businesses are separate and always have been, but the idea was being worked on inside one extended Jamaican hospitality family, which is worth knowing before anyone claims a clean sole inventor.
- 1978
Tower Isle becomes Couples
Issa converts the hotel into Couples Ocho Rios and prices the whole holiday up front. The distinctive part is not that meals and drinks are included, it is who the resort is for: couples, and nobody else. No children, no solo travellers, no bachelor parties, no general adult market, with reservations built around two people. Sandals follows three years later with an upscale couples-oriented resort, and the category that Jamaica exported to the rest of the Caribbean is under way.
- 1984
The founder dies, the family keeps it
Abe Issa dies in November, aged 79. His son Lee Issa takes the company on, develops the properties that turn one hotel into a collection, and chairs it still. Later generations have joined, including another Abe Issa in senior sales, marketing and operations.
- 1998
Swept Away, on Seven Mile Beach
Negril's Seven Mile Beach gets the brand's most physically distinctive property: rooms spread through low-rise buildings in heavy planting rather than stacked in a block, verandahs and plantation shutters, and about ten acres given over to sport, with tennis, squash, racquetball, a lap pool and a fitness complex the company calls the largest on-site at any Jamaican resort. It is a resort that expects guests to use the day.
- 2005
Sans Souci, and the fourth resort
Couples buys Sans Souci, an older cliffside property near Ocho Rios with mature gardens, stone stairways, a mineral spring, a grotto and several small coves. It was never designed as a Couples hotel, which is precisely why it does not feel like one: the estate reads as old Jamaica rather than planned resort. The same year the family sets up the Issa Trust Foundation, which works on paediatric healthcare, health screening, schools and training for Jamaican health workers.
What the dates leave out
Couples-only is much narrower than adults-only
Almost every romantic resort in the category means adults-only when it says couples: two adults are the target, but the door is open to friends, to a group of six, to anyone over eighteen. Couples means the thing it says. The room count, the restaurant layout, the boat trips and the evening all assume pairs, and the effect guests describe is less about exclusion than about atmosphere: nobody is working the room, because there is nobody to work.
It stopped at four, on purpose
Sandals started three years later and went across the Caribbean. Couples stayed on one island with four hotels in two towns, and the trade is visible in both directions. It gives up the range of destinations and the scale that pays for spectacle. What it buys is properties that are genuinely different from one another rather than variations on a template, an owner close enough to know them, a workforce and a culture that are unambiguously Jamaican, and a repeat-guest rate the rest of the industry talks about.
The inclusions go past the bar
The list runs well beyond food and drink: airport transfers, unlimited scuba for certified divers, waterskiing and other water sports, catamaran cruises, golf arrangements, some off-property excursions, premium spirits and gratuities, which staff will not take. The scuba is the one that shows up in the arithmetic, because a week of diving bought separately in the Caribbean runs to hundreds of dollars a person. The philosophy is that a prepaid holiday should stay prepaid once you leave the restaurant.
One family, two very different answers
Abe Issa built a company around vacations for two. His nephew John built SuperClubs, the group behind Breezes, Grand Lido and Hedonism, around the social end of the adult resort. Separate businesses, no shared ownership, but the same extended Jamaican family produced both ends of the adult all-inclusive, and both of them from an island that had been in the hotel business for barely thirty years.
The au-naturel corners
Two of the four have designated nude areas: Tower Isle's offshore island, which is about as clear a boundary as a resort can draw, and a separate beach and pool at Sans Souci. These are defined zones rather than a clothing-optional resort, and the rest of both properties runs clothed. It is a survival of an older Caribbean resort tradition that has mostly disappeared from the big American-facing chains.
Still Jamaican, still family owned
No Marriott, no Hyatt, no Hilton, no private equity, and no soft-brand arrangement inside somebody else's loyalty programme. Among established Caribbean all-inclusive companies that is now genuinely rare, and it is the reason the Issa Trust Foundation reads as continuous with the founder's argument in 1955 rather than as a corporate programme: the company and the country are still the same people's problem.
Everything we read on Couples
Where the company's own materials disagree with each other, we print both readings rather than choosing the tidier one.