Beaches Ocho Rios Has Closed: Where Families Should Book Instead

If you are searching for Beaches Ocho Rios, here is the news first: the resort closed permanently on May 31, 2025. This was not a renovation pause. Sandals Resorts confirmed the closure, the property's third-party owner is redeveloping the site, and guests with reservations were rebooked at other Sandals and Beaches properties.

For twenty years it was the default answer to a specific question: where do you take kids for an all-inclusive week on Jamaica's north coast? The water park, the Sesame Street characters, the family suites with bunk rooms. That answer is gone, but the question is not, so here is how we would book the same trip today.

What Sandals is doing instead

Sandals has said the Beaches brand is expanding, not shrinking: new Beaches resorts are planned for Barbados, Exuma, and, closest to home, Beaches Runaway Bay right here on the Jamaican north coast. No opening date is confirmed as of August 2026. When it opens, it will sit about seventy minutes east of Montego Bay's airport, in the same bay as the Bahia Principe resorts we drive to every week.

Where families should book now

The honest substitutes on the north coast, in the order we would consider them:

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Beaches is not where you go to fall in love with Jamaica. It is where you go to make your eight-year-old think vacation is the best week of the year.

Where it falls short

• 01Moon Palace Jamaica, Ocho Rios: the closest like-for-like. Big pools, a water play area, kids club, and the same walkable Ocho Rios base the old Beaches had.
• 02Bahia Principe Grand, Runaway Bay: the value pick. Large family rooms and a long beach, twenty minutes closer to the airport than Ocho Rios.
• 03Royalton White Sands, Falmouth: modern family suites and a lazy river, and the shortest drive of this list at about forty minutes from MBJ.
• 04Ocean Coral Spring, Trelawny: newer build, waterpark on property, big standard rooms.
• 05Jewel Grande, Montego Bay: suite-style living fifteen minutes from the airport, better for families who hate long transfer days.

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The resort closed. The reason people booked it did not. Every one of these five gives a family the same week, and most of them are a shorter drive from the airport.

Practical notes

All five are on our airport transfer routes from Sangster International (MBJ): Jewel Grande about fifteen minutes, Royalton White Sands about forty, Ocean Coral Spring about forty five, Bahia Principe about seventy, Moon Palace about ninety five. Flat rates, one price per vehicle for up to four people, and we track your flight. Book the hotel first, then the transfer at /transfers, and the week takes care of itself.

And whichever resort you land on, leave the gate at least once. Dunn's River Falls, a jerk lunch at Scotchies, and the Blue Hole will do more for the family memory of Jamaica than any water slide.