The boat skipped across the shimmering turquoise water at a breathtaking speed. “You’d better take off your hats,” the captain had warned before revving up the motor. This was the last loud sound I would hear for the next four days.
After he cut the throttle, we glided toward the sleepy marina that served as a gateway to Pine Cay, an 800-acre private island with about 40 homes, and the luxurious, beachfront Pine Cay resort.
Turks and Caicos, a chain of Caribbean islands just southeast of the Bahamas, teems with high-end, all-inclusive resorts.
These types of resorts had never much appealed to me. As a former Peace Corps volunteer, I had always seen them as sealed off from the surrounding culture. My husband, Chris, and I usually love to venture out and choose our own adventures. And as far as luxury all-inclusives went, everything I knew about them essentially came from “The White Lotus.”
So as our boat sidled up to the dock, where the staff awaited in crisp polo shirts, smiles on their faces, golf carts ready to whisk us away, I couldn’t help but note the similarities between the first episode of that series and our own entry into paradise.
The goal at a luxury resort, Armond, the White Lotus hotel manager, advised a young trainee, was to “create for the guests an overall impression of vagueness,” where they “get everything they want, but they don’t even know what they want.”
Did I, a first-time visitor and interloper into the world of high-end resorts, even know what I wanted? How would I navigate this world of luxury vagueness?
I lifted a rolled-up face towel from a tray, accepted an icy glass of rum punch and followed our host through an immaculately landscaped tropical garden to our beachfront room.
Serenaded by the Surf
Turks and Caicos drew nearly two million visitors in 2024, the latest year for which official figures were available, compared with a high of almost 1.6 million before the pandemic. Nearly 81 percent of the tourists in 2024 came from the United States, many attracted by the exquisite beaches and stunning blue water, as well as by direct flights to major cities like New York, Boston and Atlanta.
I had chosen Pine Cay from among the numerous luxury options in Turks and Caicos, including Club Med Turkoise, the celebrity favorite Amanyara and COMO Parrot Cay, similarly situated on a private island. The intimacy of Pine Cay intrigued me — it has just 15 suites and cottages — and the imprimatur of Relais & Châteaux, an association of luxury hotels and restaurants, assured me that we’d be eating well.
What most of my fellow Pine Cay guests seemed to want, and were willing to pay thousands of dollars a night to get, was glorious silence. The kind of quiet where “even the wind feels guilty for making noise,” as one of the servers at Pine Cay, a young Antiguan woman named Naffy, succinctly put it. No annoying soundtrack plays at the restaurant, diners speak in intimate tones over their vichyssoise and the rooms have no TVs (though they do have Wi-Fi). What you hear, all day and night, is the crashing of waves and the crackle of the surf receding through bits of coral and shells.
Wealthy travelers are increasingly seeking out resorts where they can disconnect from the noisy world and immerse themselves in peace. “Quiet is the new luxury,” said Misty Belles, the vice president for global public relations at Virtuoso, a consortium of high-end travel advisers.
This kind of peace has a price. At Pine Cay, it’s about $2,800 a night, including 27 percent in taxes, service charge and facility fees; breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks; kayaking, paddle boarding and sailing; and one snorkeling trip a day. That amount did not include alcoholic drinks or a $190-per-person (plus tax) round-trip group taxi and boat transfer from the airport in Providenciales. (The New York Times never accepts free travel. For the purpose of reporting this piece, we paid for all the costs.)
Inclusive resorts, it turns out, come in a range. Some cover drinks and transfers. Some, like Pine Cay, don’t, which the resort made clear up front. The booking also included an alarming notice that its boat did not run after sunset, and if you missed the last trip, you might have to hire a private charter (about $900, plus tax) or spend the night in Providenciales.
Hidden Showers and Private Vistas
Our bungalow-like room opened right onto the beach. A thatched tiki hut with two lounge chairs sat at the waterside for our exclusive use.
The room had a large screened-in area with chairs facing the ocean, and behind a wall of sliding glass doors, a king-size bed that, when slept in, felt like being wrapped in a cumulus cloud. We had two separate outdoor showers: one on the patio facing the beach, and one in a compact secret garden tucked away at the back.
Guests usually just left their doors unlocked, our host explained, showing us a wooden panel decorated with a sand dollar that served as a do-not-disturb sign. This felt at first like a “White Lotus”-worthy plot twist, but I soon came to relish not having to carry around a room key. We did, however, lock the doors at night.
Back in the poolside lobby, Sandrine Langlade, the assistant general manager, apologized for what she called the chill in the air. The winds had recently shifted, she told us as Bruno, her friendly cane corso, wandered among the guests. It was 1 degree when we left New York, so 72 and breezy seemed fine to us.
Eat, Explore, Repeat
Some of our fellow guests aimed to do absolutely nothing. But Chris and I wanted to explore, and eat. We started with excellent avocado toast, the delicate poached eggs mingling with feta cheese on homemade sourdough. A basket of light, flaky croissants and pillowy pain au chocolat reminded us that a French chef ran the kitchen.
We walked along the beach to Sand Dollar Point, a lonely spit that emerges at low tide as a shell collector’s heaven. We found ourselves alone and submerged ourselves in a shallow beryl-colored lagoon. The water was a perfect 77 degrees.
After returning for a lunch of beetroot gazpacho with pumpkin seeds and a drizzle of olive oil; pan-seared tuna with cauliflower purée and mango salsa; and mango gelato, we reserved two fat-tired beach bikes to visit two points of interest: the Aquarium, a shallow, transparent bay perfect for kayaking and paddle boarding, and Devil’s Cut, a narrow, prismatic strait spanned by a rustic wooden footbridge. One of the other guests had mentioned offhandedly that you could order a picnic lunch to enjoy at Devil’s Cut. Should we ask?
I felt awkward testing the boundaries of luxury vagueness. The staff was not going to say no, but would a “yes” quietly incur an extra charge? (It would have been complimentary, I found out later.) The downside of not-quite-all inclusive was the stress of not knowing and being too embarrassed to ask. Nobody wants to be pinching pennies in paradise.
That evening we enjoyed a sumptuous dinner of garlicky Toscana soup, perfectly rare steak with dauphine potatoes and, for dessert, velvety tiramisù. The two rye manhattans, like all of our cocktails, were followed by a small brown folder containing a room charge to sign.
The High Price of Access
That night, counting the Pleiades on a starlit private beach with only the sounds of the waves crashing, I felt the elixir of quiet, the sirens and garbage trucks of Brooklyn vanquished from my mind.
If you, like me, are not actually a member of the “White Lotus” class, Pine Cay is a once-in-a-lifetime splurge, perhaps for a milestone event like a honeymoon or an anniversary. (Pine Cay did not appear to be a place for singles, or children.) We ran up a hefty tab with drinks and a massage, on top of the thousands we spent on the stay itself.
It all felt dizzyingly expensive, but I also realize it’s not exactly cheap to run a luxury hotel with a top-notch staff on a private island with a marina, a solar farm, an airstrip and a water purification system, in a country where food can cost double or triple what it does in the United States.
Chris and I returned to Providenciales for one day before our return to New York and stayed at a modest, but noisy, hotel that would have seemed luxurious if we hadn’t come from Pine Cay. We walked the length of Grace Bay, considered one of the world’s most beautiful beaches, weaving among visitors fiddling with snorkeling gear, and ended up near the enormous Beaches resort. Kids splashed in a pool with waterfalls and fountains, and the scene buzzed with music, shouts and sunburned tourists.
Four days at Beaches can also reach into the five figures, yet most of those smiling guests didn’t seem to have a care in the world. Maybe it’s because at Beaches, the drinks are included.
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Danial Adkison is an editor for the Travel section at The Times.
The post In Turks and Caicos, Golden Silence at a Platinum Price appeared first on New York Times.
