The Shore Club Vs. Ritz-Carlton Turks & Caicos, which hotel is best? Both properties are luxury 5-star resorts. Both have wonderful white sand beaches on their doorstep, and both have pools, gyms, spas, and restaurants. In all honestly, both are great, but they are very different, and below we highlight which you want to choose. Why you might prefer The Shore Club and why you might prefer to stay at Ritz-Carlton.
When choosing the best resort for your needs in Turks and Caicos, the Shore Club is hard to beat. It’s exclusive and is located on the most private stretch of Providenciales. It can be found on a tranquil beach near Provo town and on the Providenciales’ less-developed southeast shore. The style is tropical elegance.
The Ritz-Carlton can be found on the more-developed Grace Bay. It has wonderful views and excellent facilities, but the resort lacks island charm and atmosphere. There is no doubt this is a luxury resort, but the style is modern without much character.
We dive deeper into the pros and cons of these resorts below. Read on to find out which resort is best for you.
1. Best Location: The Shore Club Vs. Ritz-Carlton Turks & Caicos
The Shore Club is located in the most sought-after location on the Turks and Caicos Islands and offers a stunning, secluded beach just minutes away from Provo’s town center. It’s lovely to be able to get to the town center for bars, shopping, restaurants, and nightlife. This is a feature that the more remote hotels like the exclusive Amanyara don’t have. At Amanyara, you must live, eat and sleep at the property as the town is 40 minutes drive away. At The Shore Club, you can properly enjoy the local island culture, eateries, and nightlife.
The Shore Club is located on Long Bay, a more remote location than Grace Bay Beach, where many of the hotels on the island, including the Ritz-Carlton, are located. If you are looking for a quiet and exclusive stay, Long Bay is perfect. The breeze on this side of the island is also refreshing in the sometimes oppressive Caribbean heat.
If you’re booking a stay at The Shore Club, we’d recommend booking through our luxury travel concierge, which is affiliated with the Virtuoso program.
The Ritz-Carlton Turks & Caicos, by contrast, is located on the busier Grace Bay and offers beautiful views, friendly service, and good restaurants. If you are a fan of Marriott Bonvoy, you will probably be drawn to this property but do bear in mind that its size and design means it lacks the personal touch.
The Ritz-Carlton is newly built on the edge of the beautiful and calm Grace Bay. It’s a 15-minute drive from Providenciales International Airport (PLS). The Ritz is ten floors high and stands out as the tallest hotel in the area, making it unpopular with some locals. The hotel feels big and modern, and all rooms have ocean views.
If you’re booking a paid stay at the Ritz-Carlton Turks & Caicos, we’d recommend booking through our concierge which is affiliated with the Marriott STARS program. You can earn Bonvoy points when booking a Marriott STARS rate and can also take advantage of any elite benefits related to your own Bonvoy status.
2. Exclusivity
The Shore Club is a boutique hotel feels very exclusive, far more exclusive than the Ritz. This oasis features 110 rooms, 38 suites, and three private oceanfront villas with private pools and expansive terraces. Rooms are large, and if you are traveling with a large family or group, their villas are exquisite.
The Ritz-Carlton has 155 well-appointed guest rooms and 27 suites in its ten-story towers and does not feel like an exclusive club. It feels like a modern city hotel on a beach with generic rooms and modern communal areas that are immaculate but lack character. While this is undoubtedly a luxury hotel, it lacks the exclusive joie de vivre offered by The Shore Club.
3. Best Pool
The Shore Club has four wonderful swimming pools, which are beautiful during the day and at night when they are lit up. The pools are arranged with an adults-only pool and a separate main resort pool for families. The wellness lap pool is ideal for optimizing your fitness.
Like the Ritz, one of the main pools has loungers that protrude on mini peninsulas into the pool, so you can step off your lounger and straight into the water. Circular outdoor sofas surrounded by fire pits overlooking the grounds and pools and are a great place to hang out around the pool as the sun goes down.
The oceanside pool at the Shore Club is perfectly positioned by the sea and is teardrop in shape with decked patios and lots of loungers, and plenty of shade.
Next to the main pool area are “poolside lounges” which are little rooms with sofas and so forth in them. The rooms only have two sides, with the other two being open to the edge of the pool and the pathway. These are nice spots to spend the day with privacy and shade but also direct pool access to cool down.
The Ritz-Carlton has two pools located beyond the three towers and near the beach. There’s a walkway directly from the lobby leading to these. The adult pool is super, with cabanas and loungers surrounding the pool. Cabanas are located directly next to the water, so you can virtually roll out of your lounger and into the ankle-deep water that surrounds the cabanas before dipping your whole body in the pool.
The family pool is less exciting in design. Both seem to have plenty of loungers even when the hotel is full. A nice touch is a complimentary sunscreen and water set out for guests. At both hotels, there is no problem getting loungers and chairs at the beach and pool.
4. Best Beach
The Shore Club is nestled on Long Bay which is not particularly wide but has nicely sloping sands into the sea, so you can wade out quite far and still only be waist deep. The beach has perfect white sand dotted with palms. The advantage of this beach is its a more remote location when compared to Grace Bay, which gives it a peaceful and exclusive vibe. The Shore Club truly is a hideaway on Turks and Caicos.
The Shore Club’s Long Bay can be windy. While wind is a disadvantage on a Scottish beach, in the stifling heat of the Caribbean, a breeze is a welcome attribute. The wind also means this is the perfect place to learn and improve your kite surfing skills. The kite surfing activity makes The Shore Club a brilliant choice for the young and the young at heart, plus they are quite a spectacle to watch.
Ritz-Carlton’s Grace Bay is also beautiful, and the beach has two layers of loungers set out on white sand. There are plenty of watersports available, but Ritz-Carlton feels big resort on the beach rather than an exclusive boutique club. A nice feature of being on Grace bay is that you can walk for miles along the sand up this beach, which is really lovely.
5. Best Style
The look and style of The Shore Club is, perhaps expectedly, in light beachy colors, blues, and sands which brings the feel of the beach into the rooms. The lobby is impressive and immaculate with high ceils and stone arches and beautifully kept tropical flower-filled grounds. The resort has a Four Seasons feel.
When you enter the Ritz-Carlton, you can’t help but be impressed by its huge, high-ceilinged open-air lobby. It certainly feels like a Ritz-Carlton, but it lacks an island feel with its massive ten-story towers and long uninteresting corridors connecting luxurious but generic rooms.
6. Best For fitness
The Shore Club offers kite surfing, a gym, spa, other water sports, free bicycle rental, and tennis courts. The pools are arranged in an adults-only pool and a separate main resort pool for families. The wellness lap pool is ideal for optimizing your fitness.
The Ritz also has water sports and a rather uninspiring corporate-style gym. There is no lap pool, so we prefer The Shore Club.
7. Best For Families
The Shore Club offers 32 island-inspired, multibedroom suites which are bathed in natural light and brilliant ocean views. Book a one-bedroom suite with a fully stocked kitchen and a study that converts to a children’s bedroom. They’ll be happy as clams climbing in the Kids Club tree house while you’re slathered in a mix of honey, brown sugar, and vanilla at the Dune Spa.
The Shore Club is ideal for families with toddlers and younger kits because of the shallow waters, but also for older kids due to the additional kite surfing activity. There’s also a complimentary Kids Club at The Shore Club and little touches like a telescope for watching the stars and watersports to keep the kids interested. Overall the Shore Club offers more for families in our opinion.
At the Ritz-Carlton, Ritz Kids, designed for ages 4-12, sparks curiosity with locally inspired environmental and cultural experiences. There are also child-friendly amenities and menus at The Ritz-Carlton.
8. Best Restaurant
The Shore Club has three spectacular restaurants offering wood-fired pizzas, candlelit dinners of Peruvian-Japanese fusion, and local seafood. Breakfast here is excellent. There’s also a complimentary shuttle to The Palms if you want a change of scene.
The Ritz-Carlton main restaurant, Coralli Restaurant, where you take breakfast, is modern and is set just behind the dunes in front of the beach, so the inner and outer patios are really lovely with stunning views. The lunch here is also decent, with sandwiches, burgers, and salads.
The Ritz-Carlton also has BLT Steak for dinner, which apparently has good cuts of meat, but being an almost vegetarian for environmental reasons, this doesn’t serve up anything I can eat. The location is near the hotel’s entrance at the back of the plot, so it lacks views, but it does have an alfresco section under palms which is pretty.
Casa Nonna is Ritz-Carlton’s Italian restaurant. It offers pasta and other Italian dishes with stunning views out over the dunes and to the ocean.
9. Best Bar
At the Shore Club, not much beats enjoying a drink in the hanging basket chairs next to the pool while dipping your toes in the water. In the rest of the poolside lounge, you can sit out around fire pits and sip your drink. This is a fantastic place to hang out in the evening. Part of the lounge area is shaded with a wooden slatted ceiling, and the whole feel of the bar area feels very Caribbean.
The Ritz also offers a nice bar area. Coralli Restaurant at the Ritz has a bar set on the edge of the dunes overlooking the beach. It’s a lovely modern space. Like the rest of the hotel, it’s luxurious with nice alfresco bar stools and comfy sofas, but it lacks an island atmosphere. The Lobby Lounge also offers drinks and runs from the open-air lobby into the grounds so you can sit outside. Again, this is a lovely modern space but lacks island charm.
10. Best Rooms
The Shore Club has 38 units, which are then subdivided to create 110 rooms. We recommend the Shore Club Deluxe one-bedroom Oceanfront Suite if you travel as a couple. At 1700 ft², this is a huge space and opens up to a patio with an ocean view. A large living area includes a full kitchen, living room with sofa bed, dining area, and outdoor patio.
Ritz Carlton offers 155 well-appointed guest rooms and 27 suites. All rooms here have ocean views, so rooms are oceanview or oceanfront. Even the base rooms here are large, at 442 ft², but they lack island charm, and if you pull the curtains closed, you could easily imagine you are in a luxury city or airport hotel anywhere in the world. Of course, being at the Ritz, the decor is luxurious, the bed is comfortable, and the bathroom is large with luxury amenities.
The balconies at the Ritz-Carlton are large, with glass rails and comfy rattan armchairs. Because of the height of the buildings, the views are impressive, but as the hotel is made up of several towers, some of the towers intrude on the view because the buildings are so large, unless you are in the waterfront block which is located on the seafront.
If you are traveling in a large group, the Shore Club will cater to you perfectly. The Shore Club offers beachfront four to six-bedroom villas that have access to The Shore Club’s resort amenities, beach, and pools. Each villa is nearly 9,00 ft², with a private pool and private elevator. Villa guests also get a butler service, VIP airport transfers, fast-track airport arrival and departure, and breakfast daily in the villa. These two-story villas have a gourmet kitchen and a private path down to the beach.
11. Best Spa
The Shore Club’s spa cabanas are hidden in the sand dunes so that you can enjoy treatments next to the ocean and overlooking the beach. The Ritz-Carlton also has an impressive state-of-the-art spa, home to a wealth of holistic treatments that harness the healing power of indigenous plants. But we prefer to be pummeled a small hut overlooking the ocean!
12. Club Lounge
The Ritz-Carlton Turks & Caicos has a club lounge. The Shore Club does not. The Club Lounge combines intimacy, comfort and exclusivity with the personalized service and attention to detail that are the hallmarks of The Ritz-Carlton. This refreshed oasis is often referred to as a hotel within a hotel, where a dedicated concierge attends to individual needs in a well-appointed, relaxed lounge environment.
Located on the 9th floor, The Club Lounge is open daily. A dedicated Club Concierge is available to assist with any need you may have during your stay, including dining and spa reservations, as well as island excursions and resort activities.
Reserved exclusively for the comfort and convenience of guests with Club Level access, the Club Lounge features a daily rotating menu of five food offerings of exquisite culinary specialties created by talented chefs and complimentary refreshments and cocktails.
13. Conclusion
Both the The Shore Club and Ritz-Carlton Turks & Caicos are wonderful hotels. If you are choosing between then you have a nice decision to make. In our opinion, The Shore Club wins on most counts. It offers more character and feels less corporate. It’s not just us who think The Shore Club is very special. The Shore Club and The Palms are the only two resorts that are ranked top 100 in the world by travel and leisure readers. Whichever hotel you choose, you are bound to enjoy it as both properties are stunning.
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