I hope not to get anything in a wringer here with the other boarders but if swimming from the beach is critical for your group, AC probably is not the place. We spent 10 days there in April and, although the beaches were a little bigger in some places than we were led to believe, they really weren't conducive to swimming from. Some of the resorts have piers and cleared places at the ends of them for swimming (Caribbean Villas for one) but the sea grass is long and thick off of all the beach areas we saw. North of the cut I can't speak for but south was pretty consistently that way. If you're used to Seven Mile beach in Jamaica or gulf beaches in Florida, this is not similar at all. We likened the beach on AC more to a town road than a quiet beach environment. Everyone uses the beach to make their way on foot---and in some places the sand is not much more than two or three feet wide and often disappears and becomes a walkway on top of a retaining wall. On the other hand, some of the resorts have a really nice expanse of sand. But the seagrass is still there and swimming would be poor. The only folks we saw swimming off the beaches were locals and then only a very few.