My Story

I was curious as to what hotel my widowed grandmother went to in 1959 and where she met her second husband. We did know she flew into Montego Bay. Searching the web, I found no historical information on Jamaican hotels. I also needed to learn something about the island to plan my grand tour. [Which I never took. I retired and every day became a holiday.] I asked questions on TripAdvisor. Then, liking old things, and realizing that I had a couple of old Esso Jamaica road maps (I like maps and real estate), this history of old Jamaican hotels was born in March 2011. It helps that the subject matter produced ample scannable ephemera and this site shows off my programming and data organization skills. Contributions of scans and information are appreciated. Don Wiss . My Home Page.

Later, based on two pictures my grandmother took on the trip when she met her future husband, I was able to determine that they met at the Montego Beach Hotel in February 1959. She also stayed at the Montego Beach Hotel in February 1952 with my grandfather (the hotel's first season). She liked to go south in the winter. After the early 1960s, she did not go to Jamaica, she wintered in Naples, Florida, and then in Key Biscayne, Florida.

Collections Here

The cutoff date for inclusion here is in existence by the early 1970s.

• Hotel Ephemera (better viewed on each hotel's page listed below):
  
  • 205 Brochures
  • 624 Postcards (with 398 scanned from my collection)
  • 142 Photos
  • 2,557 Clippings from tourist handouts, books, magazines and newspapers
• Tourism Publications and magazines with hotel and map related material. It is the source material for most of the clippings.
• Jamaica Maps that spot hotels
• Newspaper Articles on Jamaica hotels from the Kingston Gleaner

Website Building

Each hotel will be researched in the digitized Kingston Daily Gleaner. Some have been.
The hotels part of this website is generated by Excel VBA macros using data in text files. For a discussion of that, scanning, and getting newspaper articles and postcards, see Building the Site.

Site Map

Each hotel's page has a lovely satellite view of the property. Hotels are listed in island clockwise-order (traveling in that direction puts you on the water side of the road). There is a Google Map spotting the hotels, with the pins linking to the hotel pages.

There are 175 hotels listed below. 15 are "need location."