The younger Stewart is continuing the evolution set out by his father: During the pandemic he pumped $75 million into new hotels in Curaçao and Saint Vincent, which are slated to open in the spring of 2022 and 2023, respectively. There are no plans to again restart efforts to sell the company, which by some accounts was valued at $4.5 billion in 2019. “For the foreseeable future,” says Stewart, “this company will remain entirely a family-owned enterprise.”
Sandals is also overhauling some legacy properties. At the Royal Bahamian in Nassau, the Bahamas—built in 1946 and remodeled in 2016—the company is adding a winding “lagoon pool” that connects the suites to bars and social areas, and installing personal soaking tubs on some room balconies. In a nod to the new pandemic reality, it’s also demolishing an auditorium to create an outdoor entertainment area where guests can catch live shows on the beach, if they’re not already busy at the hotel’s 19 restaurants and bars, or in the suites.
Sex Sells
While the company is forging ahead in something of a new direction, it’s still retaining its honeymoon-centric roots. To wit: Its highest suite category is called the “Love Nest,” themed nights include a Newlywed Game-style “lovers night,” and the hotel’s marketing images focus on heterosexual couples canoodling while from cracked coconuts.
Stewart likes to boast that Sandals is “the largest bridal company on planet Earth,” hosting some 8,000 weddings a year.
In many ways, it’s the emphasis on lovers and honeymooners that contributes to Sandals’s unsophisticated reputation—a perception problem that Stewart acknowledges and that mars the all-inclusive sector at large.
“When travelers hear the term ‘all-inclusive,’ it’s usually not married to super, super luxury,” says Lindsey Epperly, founder and CEO of the Caribbean-focused agency Epperly Travel. “But the terms are not mutually exclusive. And Sandals has taken some very interesting steps, like creating resorts inside of resorts—where things like their overwater bungalows offer a higher level of luxury.”
At more than $6,000 for one night, the top-tier beachside suites at the Sandals Royal Barbados cost three to six times as luxury resorts across the Caribbean; prices do drop considerably with multiday stays, to around $2,200 per night for three nights. By comparison, a one-bedroom cottage on the beach at independent six-star, private-island resort Petit St. Vincent in the Grenadines runs around $1,300 per night including all meals and many activities. At Sandals Emerald Bay in the Bahamas, a beachfront villa with two bedrooms can fetch $8,000 for one night—or near $9,000 for three nights.
Staying Ahead of the Competition
Stewart says the push to overhaul Sandals’s reputation started more than a decade ago. The company has been deliberately trying to outspend its rivals for 12 years, and it has some 20 lots of prime Caribbean real estate across the Dutch, Spanish, and French Caribbean that will determine its future development. (Sibling brand Beaches, which has more of a family focus, is also on a mission to upscale.)
But Sandals has new competition. In 2020, Marriott moved into the sector, taking over 19 Blue Diamond Resorts in the Caribbean with the intention of turning them into all-inclusive versions of the Ritz-Carlton, Luxury Collection, and Westin. “When you think about a Ritz-Carlton all-inclusive, I don’t want you to think about an all-inclusive, I want you to think of an amazing Ritz that happens to be inclusive of every desire you might have,” Marriott’s global brand officer Tina Edmundson told Bloomberg in May. “There’s some negativity around that space, but we are setting out to craft and curate something that doesn’t exist.”
Stewart is unfazed. He said he’s told his design team to “go to town”—building glass-bottomed bungalows, increasingly lavish pools, French- and Caribbean-themed suites, and piling on the amenities at forthcoming locations that have broken ground in Curaçao and Jamaica. The latter property, to be called Sandals Dunn’s River, already has a $230 million budget.
“I’m looking forward to showing the world what innovation really means in this next phase of the family legacy,” Stewart says. “We are going to develop rooms that will blow your mind away.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.