Private beach is one of the most common phrases in coastal accommodation marketing, and in a great many places it describes something that legally cannot exist.
Understanding what it actually means is useful both for choosing where to stay and for knowing where you are entitled to walk.
Public access is the norm in more places than people think
Many jurisdictions treat the foreshore — broadly, the area between the tide marks — as public, held by the state, and not capable of private ownership.
Others go further and guarantee public access to the whole beach or to a strip along the coast, sometimes as a constitutional matter.
Some have a coastal path with a statutory right of way running the length of the shore.
The details vary enormously and the general pattern is that the wet sand, at minimum, is frequently public even where the land behind it is not.
Which means a hotel advertising a private beach may own the land behind, control the access route, and place its loungers on sand that anybody arriving by boat or walking along the shore is entitled to be on.
What private usually actually means
Three things, in descending order of how common they are.
Controlled access. The hotel owns the only practical route to the beach, so in practice only guests use it, without the beach itself being private.
Exclusive use of facilities. The loungers, umbrellas, service and cleaning are for guests, on a beach that is legally public.
And genuine private ownership, which exists in some jurisdictions and is much rarer than the marketing implies.
The practical consequence for a guest is usually the same — a quiet beach with service. The consequence for anybody else is that a walk along the coast may be legal and unwelcoming.
The enclosure question
A live issue in several countries and worth knowing about.
Where public rights exist, there have been persistent problems with properties blocking access routes, erecting signs implying restrictions that do not exist, or physically obstructing paths.
Campaign groups in a number of countries exist specifically to challenge this, and there have been court cases establishing that particular beaches are public where an owner claimed otherwise.
The practical upshot for a traveller is that a sign saying private beach is not always an accurate statement of the legal position, and local knowledge or a quick check of the relevant national rules is worth having before assuming.
Being confrontational about it on holiday is rarely worth the afternoon, and knowing the position is still better than not.
What you are actually paying for
Having established that the beach may be public, the premium is not for the sand.
It is for density. Fewer people per metre, guaranteed loungers, space between them, and the absence of vendors and noise.
It is for service — drinks brought, towels provided, somewhere to leave your things.
It is for maintenance, which is genuinely significant. A cleaned, raked, seaweed-cleared beach with maintained facilities requires daily work.
And it is for the walk from your room to the water being short, which sounds trivial and over a week is the thing people value most.
The environmental complication
Worth mentioning because beach maintenance is not neutral.
Raking and cleaning removes seaweed and debris, which are habitat and which play a role in stabilising sand and supporting the small organisms that birds feed on.
Heavily maintained resort beaches are visibly less biologically active than adjacent unmanaged ones, and this is measurable rather than aesthetic.
Some operators have moved to less aggressive cleaning, or clean only part of a beach, which is a reasonable compromise and worth noticing when a property does it.
How I choose now
I largely ignore the word private and look at what is actually there.
How far the beach is from the room. How many loungers relative to how many rooms, which is a ratio you can estimate from photographs. Whether there is shade. Whether the public beach next door is quiet anyway, in which case the premium buys little.
And, increasingly, whether the property has any relationship with the coast beyond owning a piece of it, because the ones that do tend to be better in every other respect too.
The public alternative next door
A practical suggestion that has saved me money more than once.
Before paying a substantial premium for beach access, look at what is immediately adjacent.
On many coasts the public beach beside a resort is equally good, equally quiet outside peak hours, and free, with the difference being service rather than sand.
Where the public beach is genuinely crowded or poor, the premium is buying something real. Where it is not, it is buying a lounger.
Satellite imagery and recent visitor photographs answer this in a couple of minutes, before committing to a week.