Elizabeth Pointe Lodge

Elizabeth Pointe is the island's best-known small oceanfront inn, and the one most often recommended to travellers who want the beach without a resort.

The building is shingle-style, deliberately modelled on a nineteenth-century Nantucket lifesaving station, and it sits directly behind the dune on South Fletcher Avenue — the oceanside road through Fernandina Beach. The wraparound porch faces the Atlantic, and the sand is a few steps down.

What makes it different

Scale and service. This is an inn, not a hotel: a small number of rooms across the main house and adjacent buildings, breakfast included, and the kind of staff-to-guest ratio that means someone knows where you are trying to get to for dinner. It is a member of the Select Registry group of independent inns.

It is also oceanside rather than south-end, which is the practical argument for it. You are on the beach, and you are five minutes from downtown Fernandina Beach rather than fifteen — so Centre Street dinners do not require a commitment.

Who it suits

Couples, and travellers who would rather have breakfast on a porch than a resort buffet. Small children are less obviously the target than at the big south-end resorts, and there is no pool complex or children's programme.

Practical notes

Room count, breakfast arrangements, minimum stays, pet policy and whether the adjacent cottages are in the same inventory all change; we have not confirmed the current position. We do not publish nightly rates. Contact the inn directly — small properties like this fill early for spring, Shrimp Festival week and the winter holidays.