The big hotel chains have spent the past year buying their way across the Caribbean, resort by resort. On Grenada’s Grand Anse Beach, three luxury resorts have held out, and not one of them belongs to a chain.
Book a big-brand resort and you know what you get before the plane lands, down to the shampoo. An independent is different every time, because it takes after whoever owns it.
The deals have come one after another. Royal Caribbean, a cruise line, agreed to pay about $3 billion this September for a half stake in Sandals, the Jamaican family company whose all-inclusives came to stand for the Caribbean vacation. The deal values the whole of Sandals at about $6 billion. A year earlier, Hyatt bought Playa Hotels and Resorts for $2.6 billion, folding a portfolio that included Caribbean resorts into a global brand. In the U.S., the number of independent boutique hotel rooms fell about 10% in a single year as the brands absorbed them.
When even the region’s biggest homegrown name sells, the independents still standing are the next targets. A Radisson sits along the same sand, but Grand Anse’s luxury resorts are all independent, and each got there a different way.
The family that never sold
Spice Island Beach Resort has stayed in one family’s hands the whole way. Opened on Grand Anse in 1961, Spice Island has been run by the Hopkin family for decades, guided for years by the late Sir Royston Hopkin, a hotelier knighted for his role in Grenadian tourism, and now by his daughter, Janelle Hopkin, its president and managing director.
The resort holds a Michelin Key and nine straight AAA Five Diamond awards, a level of recognition most 64-room resorts never reach. One of its desserts goes back three generations: the avocado ice cream her grandmother first made, still served today. The walls near the lobby carry photographs of royal visitors, among them King Charles and Queen Camilla, and most of the resort’s rooms sit steps from the sand.
The guest who bought the hotel
Along the same beach, Mount Cinnamon improbably changed hands more. Barry Collymore first came as a guest, then stayed on as a tenant, consultant and director before buying it outright from the British developer Peter de Savary in 2022.
Collymore now runs it as a Mediterranean-style wellness boutique, down to a spa whose signature massages use the cinnamon the resort is named after. Guests can take yoga on a deck above the beach or book a sound-healing session.
Independent, but not old money
Independence here is not only a matter of old family names. The newest of the three, Silversands Grand Anse, opened in 2018 as a design resort of low white lines by the architects AW2, owned by the Egyptian businessman Naguib Sawiris rather than any hotel group. His stamp on it is literal: works from his own art collection hang throughout, and a 330-foot infinity pool runs along the beachfront. He built it new and built it big, with the largest of its villas at 6,000 square feet, the size of about three average American homes.
The holdouts are worth watching
Walk the length of Grand Anse and you pass from the Hopkin family’s polished flagship to Barry Collymore’s easygoing wellness boutique to the cool, gallery-like calm of Silversands; three very different ideas of a Caribbean vacation on one beach. In between are beach bars and rum shacks where the rum punch is strong and nobody is in a hurry.
As big groups keep buying, the independent resort turns into something you have to seek out. Grenada is easy for Americans to reach with nonstop flights from Miami or New York, and seasonal winter service from Charlotte. It already has deep U.S. ties through St. George’s University, whose medical school draws thousands of American students. More visitors are finding the island, too, with arrivals during this year’s Spicemas celebrations up about 24%.
None of this is guaranteed to last. Owners age, heirs often prefer a payout to the grind of running a hotel and a chain can put up renovation money a family cannot, which is how most of the region’s independents ended up with a brand over the door. Grand Anse still has all three, and it is worth seeing while that holds.
Mandy is a luxury travel, fine dining and bucket-list-adventure journalist with expert insight from 47 countries. She uncovers unforgettable experiences around the world and brings them to life through immersive storytelling that blends indulgence, culture and discovery, and shares them with a global audience as co-founder of Food Drink Life. Her articles appear on MSN and through the Associated Press wire in major U.S. outlets, including NBC, the Daily News, Boston Herald, the Chicago Sun-Times and many more.