Iberostar Selection Rose Hall Suites

My family and I just got back from 7 nights at Iberostar Selection Rose Hall Suites in Montego Bay, Jamaica. We went in late August 2025, and had fantastic weather the entire trip. We got lucky to dodge a couple of low pressure systems that either moved up the east coast of North America (Hurricane Erin) or never materialized into anything.

All of my thoughts are through the lens of what this trip was like for my family, where we brought our 1 year old (14 months) and 4 year old. I wouldn't say we had a relaxing experience, but it was still a fun trip that we are glad we took.

The food was a solid 3/5 in my opinion. The buffet worked the best for us just because the 4 year old decided this week she wanted to be a picky eater, and the 1 year old didn't want to sit still long unless we had food to give her. So with the buffet we could serve ourselves and eat. I don't think we had a single relaxing meal, but that's just a function of traveling with little kids. The breakfast at the buffet was great daily. Omelets, pancakes, standard pastries that are also offered in the 24 hour coffee shop onsite, a huge fruit selection, smoothies, cereals, etc... Lunch and dinner options at the buffet varied. We especially liked the Jamaica night at the buffet.

The onsite restaurants left a lot to be desired. Our favorite one was the steak and lobster restaurant. The views overlooking the beach and dining in the open air were great, and the surf and turf was good. The Greek restaurant was okay, but not that good in my opinion. The menu options are good, but the quality of the food isn't anything special. For instance, our pita breads were stale. Also, of all the places we went this had the worst service. The Asian restaurant was just bad. The ramen noodles were plasticky, the "sushi" was questionable at best. Nothing that got us sick by any means, but not tasty. We did have reservations for the hibachi restaurant at the neighboring Iberostar Waves resort, but after talking with some friends we met who were underwhelmed there we decided to just stick to the buffet.

Again a friendly reminder that all of our food experiences might be jaded because of our kids. They usually eat earlier than the dinner restaurants open, so maybe they were just hangry which resulted in us having bad experiences. Hard to tell, but just wanted to get my thoughts out.

Service overall was fantastic. I'd say 9 out of 10 people every day were very friendly and helpful. By the end of the week most people knew our daughters by name and would welcome them everywhere we went. We did our best to tip for things like meals, drinks, housekeeping, and during some entertainment stuff like when my 4 year old had her face painted. I was very happy with the level of service we received.

The thing I am most disappointed with our trip was our inability to make use of all of the entertainment options they put on. I think the fault for this is split 50/50 between us traveling with little kids, but also with poor organization/advertising at the resort. They make a huge deal to make sure you download the Iberostar app (and you should!) because for each day it lists the activities they have planned and where they'll be. The issue is that this list is not very detailed, and then sometimes it's just innacurate. The best way we found to get an idea of what was going on was to just be at the main pool area when they made an announcement each morning of what to expect, but rarely would this match what was on the app. Or sometimes they'd list something but then if not enough people showed up for it they'd just cancel, which was a frustrating experience after hyping something up to our girls. Lastly, with the little kids we could not take advantage of the bulk of the nighttime activities. Most things didn't start until at least 8 pm, if not 9. After a full day of swimming at the beach and in the pool, there was no way they could last that long before bed, so unfortunately we just couldn't get to the shows or parties they put on.

The resort itself was very clean. They did put up scaffolding while we were there and started to re-paint, but honestly I felt like this was a positive because to me it just showed how much they're dedicated to keeping up appearances. Every morning the crews were out making sure the grounds were clean and that things weren't out of place.

The beach was a solid 8 out of 10 imo. We are big beach people, and we knew going in that this wasn't a pristine white sand beach. It's rocky, and after about 3 feet deep there is sea grass growing off the floor. Even with that though, it didn't take long to learn where the spots were that didn't have a lot of rocks, and where the areas with cleared out sea grass were. Once we figured that out we just made sure to get chairs near there each morning. Overall this was great for the little kids. I also paid $20 to the onsite dive shack and got access to a kayak, paddle board, and snorkel and fins for each day of our trip. There's a small artificial reef in front of the resort that I'd swim out to and each day I saw a bunch of tropical fish, some rays, puffer fish, and lionfish. There were a few vendors who would walk up and down the beach asking if you wanted a bracelet or whatever. They were all respectful if we gave a simple "no thanks" though and never pressured us. We ended up buying a couple conch shells to bring home and an ankle bracelet for the 4 year old. The only bad experience we had was one of them asked my wife to order her two drinks, which she obviously shot down. When the beach got windy, we'd take the girls to the onsite kids water park. The 4 year old especially loved this. Lots of slides and shallow water to run around in. It was also a good spot for the 1 year old to explore a little bit without having to be held in a deeper pool.

Because we booked for 7 nights, transportation to/from the airport was included via one of the onsite tour booking companies. This was easy to arrange and I appreciated having one less thing to worry about.

This is already too long but I just wanted to dump my thoughts before I started to forget specifics. If anyone has any questions feel free to ask away and I'll do my best to answer. Overall we had a really great time and are happy to have done it (but also happy that we won't ever travel internationally with a 1 year old again lol.)