How Sandals got here
Almost every other big name in this category was built by a hotel family or a foreign corporation. Sandals was built by a Jamaican who sold air conditioners, had never run a hotel, and bought a derelict one next to an airport runway.
Founded 1981 · Montego Bay, Jamaica · Last reviewed August 2026
- 1968
Appliance Traders Limited
Stewart founds an appliance import business selling air conditioners, refrigerators, water coolers and stoves. Servicing the air conditioning in Jamaican hotels puts him in and out of resorts constantly, and he forms the view that a lot of them are underserving their guests while sitting on some of the best beachfront on the island. Currency rules push the same way: Jamaica restricted the foreign exchange available for imports in the 1970s, and a tourism business earning US dollars could support one that needed them.
- 1981
A closed hotel by the runway
In April he buys the dilapidated Bay Roc in Montego Bay, reportedly shut for years, to open bemusement from established hoteliers who wondered what a man with no hospitality experience wanted with it. He spends roughly four million dollars over seven months and reopens it in November as the Sandals Resort Beach Club, now Sandals Montego Bay.
- 1984
The swim-up bar
A swim-up pool bar goes into Sandals Montego Bay. The company sometimes says it invented the thing outright, which is marketing shorthand: submerged pool bars existed before 1984. What Sandals can defensibly claim is introducing the idea to the Caribbean and making it standard there, which is the more interesting achievement anyway.
- 1985
Along the north coast
A second Montego Bay property opens as Sandals Carlisle in 1985, and Sandals Royal Caribbean follows in 1986 with its own small offshore island. Negril comes in 1988 and Ocho Rios in 1989. Inside eight years the company has covered Jamaica's resort coast.
- 1991
Out of Jamaica
Sandals Antigua is the first resort outside Jamaica. Saint Lucia, the Bahamas, Grenada, Barbados, Curaçao and Saint Vincent follow. Unlike the Spanish chains, Sandals stays inside the Caribbean on purpose and turns regional depth into part of the pitch.
- 1990s
Beaches, for the people who had children
The couples formula worked, and then the couples had kids and could not come back. Beaches Resorts keeps the all-inclusive structure and adds kids' clubs, water parks and family rooms. A later partnership with Sesame Workshop puts Sesame Street characters and activities inside the resorts.
- 2004
Who counts as a couple
For years the couples-only rule meant male-female couples only, which drew criticism, legal pressure and advertising bans in London. In 2004, after sustained pressure from LGBTQ+ advocates and London authorities, Sandals opened its couples resorts to all adult couples. A history of a couples brand that skipped the part where the definition of a couple changed would not be much of a history.
- 2006
The next generation
Butch Stewart appoints his son Adam Stewart chief executive. Butch stays on as chairman.
- 2009
The Sandals Foundation
The company's foundation launches, working on Caribbean education, community and environmental projects: school improvements, scholarships, marine conservation and disaster relief.
- 2016
Overwater villas in the Caribbean
Sandals opens overwater villas at Sandals Royal Caribbean in Montego Bay, marketed as the Caribbean's first luxury all-inclusive overwater accommodation. The heart-shaped pier, glass floor panels, hammocks slung over the water and private infinity pools become the most reproduced images the company has.
- 2021
Butch Stewart
Stewart dies in January, forty years after buying a hotel nobody else wanted. Adam Stewart becomes executive chairman.
What the dates leave out
The boy with the canoe
Stewart grew up on Jamaica's north coast and, by the biographical accounts, bought a small canoe at around twelve, caught fish and sold them to the local hotels. He saw the tourism industry from the supplier's side first, which is roughly where he was standing again in 1968 with a van full of air conditioners.
The runway problem, turned around
Buying the hotel next to the airport came with the obvious drawback that aircraft land next to it. Sandals turned that into the shortest airport transfer in the business and sold it as a feature. The aircraft are still part of the property's character.
What Sandals actually changed
Stewart did not invent the all-inclusive holiday or the couples resort, and Sandals says as much. Both already existed on the same island: John Issa's Negril Beach Village opened in 1976, and his uncle Abe Issa turned the Tower Isle Hotel into the couples-only Couples Ocho Rios in 1978, three years before Sandals. What Stewart did was put the two together and push the result decisively upmarket. Early all-inclusives largely meant a room, a buffet and house drinks; Sandals extended the promise to speciality restaurants, premium-brand spirits, airport transfers, taxes and tips, motorised and non-motorised water sports, scuba for certified divers and evening entertainment, and sold the whole thing as a holiday you could take without a wallet.
Weddings became a product
The company pushed wedding and honeymoon packages hard, at times including a basic wedding with a qualifying stay. That is a large part of why a Caribbean destination wedding stopped being an elaborate custom undertaking and became something you could simply buy, and it is why Sandals is now about as associated with weddings as with all-inclusives.
Butlers, from the English guild
Personal butler service in the top suites, with training through the Guild of Professional English Butlers, gave the resorts an unusual combination: the scale and simplicity of an all-inclusive with services normally found only in small luxury hotels, down to unpacking your luggage and arranging private meals.
Jamaican-owned, and vertically integrated
Sandals is among the most recognisable hotel companies ever built in the Caribbean, and its ownership, headquarters and identity stayed Jamaican throughout. Stewart's wider interests ran to appliance retail, motor distribution, media including The Jamaica Observer, a major stake in Air Jamaica, and hospitality design and procurement. That instinct to own the whole chain rather than just the hotel is the same one the Mallorcan groups had, arrived at independently and on the other side of the Atlantic.
Everything we read on Sandals
Where the company's own materials disagree with each other, we print both readings rather than choosing the tidier one.