Caribbean Editor Picks

Favored by visiting celebrities, this 179-acre Moorish-style oasis offers 72 rooms and suites, six pool villas, three restaurants, spa and holistic services, tennis, croquet, and watersports.

Seeking a place big enough to accommodate an entire family without splurging on a villa? Consider the gingerbread cottages at Hotel Guanahani & Spa – the largest resort on the island. Of the 68 cottages spread out over 16 acres overlooking Marigot Bay, the most charming are the colorful, oceanview houses that are right on the beach. Rooms have elegant wood floors and pastel accents that create a sleek Creole vibe that is at once contemporary and classic.

Celebs and CEOs alike flock to Sandy Lane to be pampered. The golf club is unmatched, the spa hedonistic, the food fabulous, the digs opulent, the architecture stately, and the service (including personal butlers) professional yet discreet.

Jamaica Inn—an old-school luxury retreat run by the Morrow family since 1958—is more of a whiteglove experience compared with the Island Outpost resorts, but it still provides an intimate holiday beyond the gated compounds. During the inn’s heyday, Winston Churchill painted in the garden, and Noël Coward and Errol Flynn paid regular visits. Now the retro ambience, highly experienced service—one staff member, Teddy, has worked there for 50 years!—and timeless style are cherished by repeat visitors. The property, on a private cove in Ocho Rios (lovingly called “Ochee” by the locals), boasts 47 spacious suites and four two-bedroom cottages, all with a private balcony or a veranda. The inn’s alfresco restaurant gets top marks for fl avorful local cuisine, and the seaside spa offers holistic treatments. The north coast around Ocho Rios offers prime excursions, such as tours of nearby historic estates, including Prospect Plantation, Firefl y, and Harmony Hall. Many of them have been restored and are now open to the public as museums, offering a glimpse of Jamaican island life as it once was.

If waking up to waves caressing white sand is your priority, choose the friendly Nisbet Plantation Beach Club; the rest of the inns are high up in the forested hills. Built in 1778, the great house of the club is the ancestral home of Fanny Nisbet, the Nevisian society widow famously wooed (and later abandoned) by the dashing Lord Horatio Nelson—there are plaques all over the island, and even a museum in town, dedicated to Lord Nelson. Twenty-two cheery yellow cottages dot the gently sloping lawn, which grandly unfurls itself toward the picture-perfect beach. Though it’s technically on the Atlantic Ocean side, the iridescent water is nearly as mellow as the Caribbean. After dinner, slide into the beachside hot tub, and watch the stars crawl across the sky. Closed August through early October.

If you’re going “all-inclusive,” this is the best of Jamaica’s seven wildly popular Sandals resorts. The genuinely enthusiastic staff ensures that the most you’ll worry about is which of the six specialty restaurants (including Jam-Asian Cuisine, a teppanyaki grill and barefoot dining destination on the beach) you’re going to dine at. Stretching along a half-mile of Negril’s famed Seven Mile Beach, the lively, super-casual, couples-only resort has 222 rooms from standard “luxury” units to two-story lofts to opulent zero-entry, swim-up suites to choose from. There are also two swimming pools (including one dedicated to scuba instruction) and two whirlpools. Families head for the chain’s nearby Beaches resort, which woos little ones with kid-friendly entertainment, programs, and food (www.beaches.com).

Puerto Rico’s largest resort is located near El Yunque rainforest and sprawls across 500 acres atop a 300-foot bluff – a funicular descends to the sea where a catamaran shuttles guests eight minutes to a private island with a small beach. The property encompasses four “villages” with 750 rooms on different levels of the hill, plus Las Casitas, a hotel-within-the-hotel offering 154 luxury villas. But most of the action takes place at the top level, home to the outsized lobby, casino, tennis, 18-hole golf, a multi-level pool area and extended convention facilities. With more than a dozen restaurants, there are plenty of dining choices, though most of it skews expensive. The Asian-themed Golden Door Spa is one of the Caribbean’s most renowned.

The 26 relaxed, island-style bungalows at The Cove are set on 27 acres fronting the most breathtaking pink sand beach in the Bahamas, just a couple of miles northwest of Gregorytown. Each of the rooms and suites is adorned with iPods, beds with 600 thread-count sheets, tile floors, and spacious living areas just steps from the surf. Walk up to their hilltop pool for superb views of Eleuthera. For the price, the Cove borders on peerless.

Sophisticated yet laid-back resort with 27 airy, affordably chic suites boasting kitchenettes and cable TV. Onsite amenities include beachside pool, lively bar, gourmet market, spa, trendy boutique, and informal dining area serving scrumptious breakfasts and Caribbean-inspired cuisine.

This lovely small hotel is just a five minute walk from downtown Hamilton's hustle-and-bustle and offers high quality for less than most Bermudian lodgings. The traditional pink-and-white 1903 main house, carefully restored, features a wraparound front porch with rocking chairs and canopied swings. Free continental breakfast is served in a warm whimsical room (painted square columns and wood parrots contrast with polished hardwoods and white wicker) with picture windows surveying tranquil, elaborate gardens with stately palms and fragrant fruit trees. All 32 sun-filled rooms, suites, and cottages have A/C, flat-screen TV, coffeemaker, hairdryer, safe, iron/board, and high-speed Internet access; most include kitchenette. Many were converted from the living rooms, bedrooms, and parlors of the original house and boast such embellishments as cathedral ceilings, triple-crown moldings, pastel-hued walls, and tall windows.