SANDALS EMERALD BAY

Sandals Emerald Bay is closed. It welcomed its last guests on 15 August 2024, and it will not reopen under that name.

The property is being converted into Beaches Exuma, the group's family brand. No reopening date has been announced to date.

This page exists to tell you the truth and point you somewhere useful, rather than let you book a hotel that no longer exists. Exuma remains one of the finest destinations in the Bahamas, and three addresses there are receiving travellers right now. We present them below.

Where to go in Exuma right now

Let us start with the useful part. Three properties are receiving travellers on Great Exuma, and they answer three different needs.

Grand Isle Resort and Residences is the most upscale, with seventy-eight villas fitted with full kitchens, from one hundred and fifteen to four hundred and eighty square metres, on an Emerald Bay peninsula. It is the immediate neighbour of the closed Sandals, and the highest-rated address in the whole archipelago at 4.6 out of 5. Budget for a golf cart rental and a twenty-two percent surcharge on the booking.

Hideaways, near George Town, offers cottages and one to three bedroom villas, with a free shuttle to the village. It has the most active flow of reviews on the island.

Augusta Bay is a small eighteen-room oceanfront inn, with breakfast included, a few minutes from George Town.

None of the three is an all-inclusive. In Exuma that format disappeared with the Sandals closure. If the wristband formula is essential to you, your advisor will point you to Nassau, where several addresses offer it, at 1 866 628-6241.

How we can be certain

We do not rely on rumour. The proof comes from Sandals itself.

The property's official page, on the group's own site, currently states that Sandals Emerald Bay will reopen under the Beaches brand, and explicitly says the hotel closed its doors on 15 August 2024. No guest review has been published after that date, on any platform.

When an operator announces the closure of its own hotel, there is nothing left to verify. That is the case here.

What will replace the Sandals

Beaches Exuma is the announced project: a hundred-million transformation, under a hundred-and-twenty-million agreement in principle signed with the Bahamian government. Two hundred and forty-nine rooms and suites are planned across five hundred beachfront acres.

The brand change is significant. Sandals welcomes couples exclusively; Beaches is the group's family brand. The property, if it opens as announced, will therefore address a completely different clientele from the one that used to stay there.

Why we promise no date

Sandals is targeting « late 2027 ». The official site says only that the reopening date will be announced soon.

Here is why we remain cautious, and we would rather say it plainly. In April 2026 the project was still in the tender phase, while site mobilization had been targeted for the beginning of that same year. No source confirms that work has actually started since.

A late-2027 target still out to tender in spring 2026 is a fragile target. A slip to 2028 is plausible. We will therefore make no commitment to you for 2027, and we recommend planning no trip around that date until a firm opening is announced. We will update this page as soon as one is.

If you wanted a Sandals

Sandals Royal Bahamian, on Cable Beach in Nassau, is open and fully operating. It reopened in February 2022 after a fifty-five-million renovation and holds 404 suites, ten restaurants, a private island reached by ferry and scuba diving included for certified divers.

It keeps the brand's codes: couples only, eighteen and over, with no resort fees at all. It is not Exuma's isolation, since Nassau is a working city, but it is a real Sandals, open and verified.

If you wanted Exuma

It is worth the trip for what it is: water of rare clarity, sandbars that surface at low tide, the swimming pigs of Big Major Cay, the iguanas of Bitter Guana Cay and the nurse sharks of Compass Cay. Excursions leave from George Town.

A nonstop service exists from Toronto in season, November through April. From Montreal a connection is required, through Toronto in season, through South Florida or through Nassau.

The island overview sits on Great Exuma travel, and the archipelago on Bahamas travel. For other sun destinations, see all-inclusive vacations.