Before the Resort, There Was Something Else Entirely

By A La Mode Vacations · Caribbean Specialists Since 1985

Here is a thing that happens every day somewhere in the travel industry: a couple books a Sandals resort because it has the best swim-up suite photos on the website, arrives to find the property is on a rocky shoreline rather than a sandy beach, and spends the first day quietly recalibrating their expectations. The resort is excellent. The beach is not what they imagined. These are two separate facts, and the travel booking sites that sold them the trip presented only the first one.

The Caribbean has extraordinary variation compressed into a surprisingly small geographic area. Saint Lucia has dramatic volcanic terrain, black-sand coves, and the Pitons — two UNESCO-listed peaks that turn extraordinary colors at dusk. It does not have the long, flat, white-powder beaches that appear in most Caribbean photography. The Bahamas has those beaches. Jamaica has both, depending on which parish you’re in. Barbados’s west coast is calm and clear; its east coast faces the Atlantic and is beautiful in an entirely different, more turbulent way.

“The resort is not the destination. The destination is the destination. The resort is where you sleep, eat, and decompress from the destination.”

This matters practically. If you want to wake up and walk directly into warm, calm, shallow water, you want the west coast of Barbados or the protected lagoons of the Bahamas. If you want to hike a volcano in the morning and have a butler-delivered cocktail by the infinity pool in the afternoon, Saint Lucia is doing something the others are not. If you want five-star food in a setting where the Caribbean is genuinely visible from every restaurant table, Grenada’s LaSource has done the architectural work to make that possible.

The reason to use a specialist rather than a search engine is simple: a search engine sorts by price and reviews. A specialist sorts by what you actually want from a week. They are different algorithms, and only one of them involves a conversation.

By A La Mode Vacations · Caribbean Specialists Since 1985

There was a time, not long ago, when “all-inclusive dining” was a phrase that landed with a particular thud in the ears of anyone who cared about food. The buffet was a permanent fixture. The cocktails were sweet and premixed. The steak, when it appeared, arrived at a temperature that suggested it had been prepared at some point in the afternoon and kept warm since. This was not a secret that the resorts were hiding. It was simply the deal: unlimited quantity in exchange for a certain flexibility about quality.

That deal has been renegotiated. Sandals now operates more than 240 dining experiences across its Caribbean properties, a number that includes multiple celebrity-chef partnerships, dedicated Japanese omakase counters, farm-to-table concepts sourcing from local Caribbean producers, and a wine program that a serious sommelier would find worth discussing. The Soy restaurant at Sandals Royal Barbados — the flagship opened in 2017 — seats guests for a choreographed omakase progression that has no business existing inside an all-inclusive resort and yet does, without apology.

“The buffet is still there. It’s simply no longer the main character. It has been demoted to a supporting role and seems, on balance, to be handling the transition well.”

The practical consequence for travelers is that the question “what will I eat?” — once a reasonable source of concern before a Caribbean all-inclusive booking — has been replaced by a more interesting problem: which of the twelve restaurants do you want for Tuesday. This is a better problem to have. Our agents know which restaurants at which properties require advance reservations, which ones are genuinely worth the effort of securing a table, and which ones sound better in the brochure than they perform in practice. The distinction is worth asking about before you arrive.

By A La Mode Vacations · Caribbean Specialists Since 1985

The address of the Sandals Royal Barbados sits on what was, for most of the 18th and 19th centuries, an active sugarcane plantation. The same is true for much of the luxury resort corridor that runs along Barbados’s Platinum Coast. Saint Lucia’s most celebrated resort properties are built on land that was variously French and British territory, occasionally simultaneously, over a fifty-year period in the 1700s that involved the island changing hands fourteen times. Jamaica’s Montego Bay — now home to five Sandals properties — was called “Lard Bay” by early British settlers, a name derived from the lard they rendered from the wild boar they found there, which is a considerably less glamorous origin story than the beaches currently suggest.

This is not ancient history that exists only in archives. It is, in many cases, visible. The great houses that administered plantation operations still stand on several Caribbean islands, some of them converted into restaurants or hotel public spaces. The stone fortifications the British and French built to defend their respective sugar investments still crown the hills above the bays where cruise ships now anchor. Walking Grenada’s capital, St. George’s, involves moving through a harbor town whose architecture dates to the 1700s and whose pastel buildings were painted, originally, to match the colors that French colonial administrators considered appropriate.

“Every Caribbean resort sits on a story. Most of them don’t put it in the brochure. The islands themselves, however, are not shy about it.”

The reason this matters for travelers is straightforward: the Caribbean is more interesting than its marketing department suggests. The resorts are good. The islands are extraordinary. They are not the same thing, and the best trips involve engaging with both. A good travel agent will help you plan the beach days. An exceptional one will point out that the drive from Sandals Saint Lucia to the Soufrière volcano is forty-five minutes and that it is an unreasonable thing to be that close to an active volcano and not go.

By A La Mode Vacations · Caribbean Specialists Since 1985

Gordon “Butch” Stewart was an air-conditioning salesman when he opened his first hotel in Montego Bay, Jamaica in 1981. He had no formal training in hospitality. What he had was a single observation that most of the resort industry had missed: Caribbean tourism, as it existed at the time, was structured entirely around the visitor. The locals who built, cleaned, cooked, and served in the resorts went home at the end of the shift to communities that saw essentially none of the money. The beaches were for tourists. The nice restaurants were for tourists. The island, it often seemed, was a stage set rather than a place where people actually lived.

Stewart’s question was simple: what if the resort industry actually invested in the islands it depended on? The Sandals Foundation, which he established in 2009, has put $20 million into Caribbean education, health, and environmental programs. Fifty thousand students have received educational support. Two hundred and fifty thousand coral fragments have been planted through the foundation’s reef restoration programs — a number significant enough that marine biologists cite it in academic papers about Caribbean reef recovery.

“He asked why Caribbean tourism only worked for visitors. The answer he built has funded schools, hospitals, and coral reefs across eight islands.”

Stewart died in 2021. His family continues to operate Sandals and Beaches Resorts. The company remains privately held, which means the long-term thinking that characterized Stewart’s approach to the Caribbean — the investments that don’t pay off in a single quarter but that build something over decades — is structurally possible in a way it wouldn’t be for a publicly traded company. When you book a Sandals resort, you are booking into a business that has decided, as a matter of company policy, that the islands it operates on matter beyond their utility as a backdrop for vacation photography. This is not the most common position in the resort industry.

By A La Mode Vacations · Caribbean Specialists Since 1985

The infinity pool is, technically speaking, a hydraulic trick. The water is not actually falling into the sky or the ocean or whatever horizon it appears to be merging with. There is a catch basin below the overflow edge, the water circulates back, and the whole arrangement is engineered specifically to produce the illusion of a pool without edges — an effect that was first achieved, at architectural scale, in French formal garden design of the 17th century, where reflecting pools were deliberately positioned to produce the same visual elision of water and sky. The Romans had overflow pools. The medieval Islamic world built them into garden architecture. The concept is ancient. The branding is recent.

The modern resort infinity pool in its current form — dramatically cantilevered over a hillside or beachfront, positioned for a specific view, photographed from a specific angle in the late afternoon light — can be traced reasonably confidently to a 1992 project by landscape architect John Lautner in Palm Springs. It was adopted by the luxury resort industry slowly through the 1990s and then, once the internet made resort photography a primary driver of booking decisions, very quickly indeed. The visual grammar is now universal: vanishing edge, view, late afternoon sun, possibly a cocktail in frame.

“The pool above the Pitons at Jade Mountain was not designed to be photographed. It was designed to be in. The photography was an afterthought. The view was the point.”

What varies, significantly, is the quality of the view the pool is positioned to frame. The infinity pool at Jade Mountain in Saint Lucia looks directly at the Pitons — two volcanic spires rising from the Caribbean that are, by general agreement, among the most dramatic geological formations in the Western Hemisphere. The pool at Sandals Royal Barbados has the Platinum Coast. The pool at Iberostar’s Joia Maya in Mexico has the Riviera Maya jungle canopy and a glimpse of the Caribbean beyond it. The hydraulics are identical. The experience of sitting in them is completely different, which is why the choice of pool matters as much as the fact of having one.

By A La Mode Vacations · Caribbean Specialists Since 1985

There is a reef off the coast of Grenada that is recovering. Coral fragments — 250,000 of them — have been planted along sections of the reef that suffered bleaching events during particularly warm Atlantic seasons in the early 2000s. The program responsible for this is run by the Sandals Foundation and staffed, in part, by marine biology students from Caribbean universities who receive scholarship support from the same foundation. The scholarships exist because the foundation also funds education. The students study at universities where the Sandals Foundation has built science laboratories. The laboratories are in schools that the foundation renovated. The circle closes, as the better philanthropic programs tend to do, with the money going into systems rather than gestures.

Twenty million dollars. That is the figure the Sandals Foundation cites for total community investment since its founding in 2009. It covers education, environment, and community development across eight Caribbean islands. Fifty thousand students have received some form of educational support. The reef program is the most visible externally but may not be the most significant locally — that distinction likely belongs to the school feeding programs, which operate in areas where a reliable hot meal at school is not something every family can guarantee.

“$20 million. Eight islands. The accounting is straightforward. What it adds up to is harder to quantify: a set of islands that are genuinely better because a resort decided it was their problem too.”

For travelers choosing between resort brands at similar price points, the Sandals Foundation is one differentiating factor that the websites don’t tend to put in the headline. It probably should be. A vacation at a Sandals property in Saint Lucia or Jamaica is, in a small but real way, a contribution to the educational and environmental infrastructure of the island you are visiting. This does not make it charity. It makes it a choice with slightly better consequences than the alternatives, which seems worth knowing about.

By A La Mode Vacations · Sandals Elite Specialist

Butch Harmon is, by most accounts, the most decorated golf instructor in the history of the sport. He coached Tiger Woods through the most dominant run in professional golf — the late 1990s and early 2000s — and subsequently worked with Phil Mickelson, Greg Norman, Adam Scott, and a list of tour professionals that reads like a Hall of Fame ballot. He is the son of Claude Harmon, who won the 1948 Masters. Golf instruction, in the Harmon family, is not a career so much as a vocation that spans generations.

His connection to Sandals Resorts grew from exactly the kind of relationship that the resort industry is built on: a genuine enthusiasm for a product that he then chose to represent publicly. Harmon developed a partnership with Sandals that established the Butch Harmon School of Golf at Sandals Emerald Bay in the Bahamas — a championship course set on one of the most dramatic pieces of golf real estate in the Caribbean, designed by Greg Norman on a peninsula with the Atlantic on three sides. The school brought Harmon’s instructional methodology — the same framework that rebuilt Tiger Woods’s swing — to guests who had never had access to tour-level instruction and who were, as it happened, already at an all-inclusive resort with nothing scheduled for Tuesday morning.

“Harmon brought the same swing methodology that produced Tiger Woods’s best golf to a beach resort in the Bahamas. The students are less experienced than Tiger. The Atlantic backdrop is considerably better.”

The practical result for Sandals guests is a golf program that takes the instruction seriously in a way that most resort golf schools do not. The Harmon methodology emphasizes fundamentals over fixes: grip, stance, and the mechanics of a repeatable swing rather than the spot adjustments that most resort lessons offer. Guests who have gone through the program at Emerald Bay consistently report that they arrived as recreational golfers and left with something to actually work on — which is a different outcome from most vacation golf experiences, where the lesson is pleasant and the improvement is negligible.

The Emerald Bay course itself is worth noting separately from the school. Eighteen holes on a peninsula in the southern Bahamas, Greg Norman design, no development visible from most of the fairways — just the Atlantic, the island’s interior, and the particular blue of the Bahamian sky at seven in the morning when the course opens. For couples where one person golfs seriously and one does not, the proximity to a full-service Sandals property means the non-golfer is not simply waiting. They are, in all likelihood, in a swim-up suite. This is a workable arrangement.

By A La Mode Vacations · Apple Vacations Elite Partner Since 1985

Apple Vacations was founded in 1969 by John Mullen, a Philadelphia-area entrepreneur who had a straightforward idea: package the flights, the hotel, and the transfers into a single price, and sell them to working families who wanted a real vacation but didn’t have the time or the expertise to arrange all three pieces separately. The company operated out of suburban Philadelphia, served a largely Northeastern customer base, and was, by the standards of the travel industry, a modest regional operation. It was also, in retrospect, precisely the right business model at precisely the right moment in American consumer history.

The all-inclusive resort concept was still developing in the Caribbean through the 1970s and early 1980s. As it crystallized — as properties in Jamaica, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic figured out that the unlimited-everything model generated both guest satisfaction and advance payment certainty — Apple Vacations found itself positioned to distribute these resorts to exactly the market that wanted them. The Philadelphia suburbs. The mid-Atlantic corridor. Families who had never heard of the Riviera Maya but who, once they understood what “all-inclusive” meant in practical terms, immediately wanted to go. Doylestown Travel — A La Mode Vacations — was among the agencies that helped translate this new category to clients who trusted us rather than a brochure.

“Apple started as a regional Philadelphia operation serving families who wanted the Caribbean but didn’t know where to start. Doylestown Travel was one of the agencies that showed them the door.”

The company grew steadily through the 1980s and 1990s, becoming one of the largest sellers of all-inclusive vacations in the United States. It merged with Funjet Vacations in the early 2000s under the umbrella of Apple Leisure Group, which expanded the portfolio to include hotel brands — first through partnerships, then through ownership. The AMR Collection, which includes Secrets, Dreams, Breathless, and Zoëtry, was acquired and developed under Apple Leisure Group. By 2021, the portfolio had grown to the point where it attracted Hyatt Hotels Corporation, which acquired Apple Leisure Group in a transaction valued at approximately $2.7 billion. The family vacation company from suburban Philadelphia had become a corporate giant with a Fortune 500 acquirer.

For A La Mode Vacations, the forty-year relationship with Apple and its successor companies is not primarily a business history. It is a client history. The couples we booked on their first Cancún trip in 1989 came back in 1994 with children. The children came back in 2010 as couples. The couples are now coming back with their own children to resorts that didn’t exist when their parents first went. Apple Vacations grew because the product worked. We grew alongside it because the clients kept coming back. The Hyatt acquisition changes the corporate structure but not the fundamental transaction: a family that trusts us to send them somewhere good, and forty years of evidence that we will.

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Before the Resort, There Was Something Else Entirely

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