Author: Pretty Pleased

Royal Passover aims to deliver. They pick you up and take you to the resort and serve you a drink while you wait to check in. The hotel is stunning. It was incredibly brave to run a passover program in a hotel that was not yet open. The staff had arrived the day before us so they knew almost nothing about the resort and most of them didn't know if they would have a job when it reopened after we left. I thought the food was amazing. The chefs came from Israel and we were pretty pleased. It didn't make our meat and potato family members quite as pleased and they had not thought at all about vegetarian meals for the seder or yom tov meals. The program featured zumba and movement class. These were great except that the yoga/movement class was taught on marble and there were no yoga mats! (Details like these seemed to get lost). There were great excursions-we went kayaking and to the rain forest and they didn't charge an extra fee! The program director, Tali Rahmini and her family were warm and kind and helpful and had a great presence. The first few days there were lots of things not so well sorted out (maps of the dining room weren't set up properly and there weren't enough wait staff and people didn't all have tables set for seder). The first night there was a buffet outside and it wasn't set up for the number of people and it wasn't well lit, so it was very hard to see what you were eating. Things like this improved over the week. The entertainment was amazing. Meir Kay was a lot of fun and Shwekey and Gad Elbaz and Eli Levin were terrific. The tefillot were beautiful and the minyanim had singing and nice layning and joyful hallel. The chazan balanced nicely singing with some chazanut. The people in the program were warm and spanned a gamut of Chabad, Syrians, Persians, MO and everyone seemed to get a long well. The program was truly enhanced by the nightly kumsitz in the lobby and also lots of singing in the dining room. It had a lot of ruchniyot. There was a nice attention to detail to make sure there were gorgeous table cloths for the seder and flowers at the tables and throughout the hotel.