Passover vacation niche grows to dozens of destinations

For many Jews like Benkof, traveling to vacation hotspots during the eight-day Passover holiday has become a way of avoiding the hassle of heeding religious rules that require scrubbing a home clean of grain particles or hosting back-to-back, hours-long dinners at their homes for dozens of relatives and friends.

Bloom estimates that up to 50,000 hotel rooms for as many as 100,000 people are booked this year for Passover, which starts at sundown Friday.

Passover travel programs at the resorts, which include Ritz-Carlton and Waldorf Astoria hotels in Florida, are accommodating the celebrants with kids' camps, casino nights, Hawaiian luaus, daily barbecues, lectures by rabbinic scholars and meals that follow kosher dietary rules of separating milk from meat and prohibiting pork and shellfish, along with Passover prohibitions against bread.

"People are more willing to not have the traditional Passover at home and actually go away, with the ability to make hotel kitchens kosher, source food locally that is kosher," said Bloom, who is based in Manchester, England.

Depending on the hotel and destination, prices for Passover vacation packages range from $1,600 to $11,000 per person, and typically cover lodging, unlimited food and entertainment.

Many tour operators hosting Passover vacations bring in their own rabbis and staff to make the resorts Passover-ready.

"There is a tremendous amount of work that goes into making a kitchen kosher," said Alan Berger, who is running the Grand Getaways Passover vacations.