About Us

Your host, Stuart Katz, founded Deluxe Kosher Tours in 2009 with a very specific goal in mind.  To provide the discerning, kosher traveler with a unique travel experience, combining excellent service, accommodations and food with interesting, intriguing and enjoyable itineraries.

Stuart has twenty five years of combined experience in the travel business. Stuart is best known for his company, TAL Tours, which has served tens of thousands of satisfied travelers over the years. Deluxe Kosher Tours offers its clients excellent kosher food and accommodations. Most of all, it provides prompt, attentive service. From the time you reserve your place on one of our tours, until you return home, we will be here to provide for your needs, and respond to your requests. This is your vacation, and it is our commitment to make you trip with us enjoyable, stress free and happily memorable.

In both off-the-beaten path places and familiar places around the world you’ll have three strictly kosher meals and deluxe accommodations. An English-speaking guide will accompany you from the moment you arrive at your destination until the moment you depart. And at each destination a knowledgeable local guide will join the tour.

And let me tell you about those kosher meals: No kosher airplane food will ever be seen on our tours. At Deluxe Kosher Tours all our meals are prepared locally – either by a local kosher caterer or by a chef who accompanies the tour. The tour escort and/or hands-on food coordinator and mashgiach play pivotal roles in ensuring the freshness of each and every meal served en-route.

Interview Excerpt

Chef Shay Stuart Katz about Deluxe Kosher Tours for Shaya’s blog at www.atyourpalate.com. Here’s an excerpt from Shaya’s interview of Stuart:

I’m originally from Panama but left at a young age. I grew up in San Diego, then later went away for high school to Skokie Yeshiva in Chicago. After high school, I spent a year of work-study in Israel on Kibbutz Yavne, after which I returned to receive a Bachelors at UC San Diego.

I went on to complete a Masters in Public Health from Columbia University and an MBA from Southern Methodist University in Dallas. I planned to make aliyah after this but was offered an opportunity to start a tour company with a focus on Israel travel in New York with the “promise” that after two years I would manage the company in Israel.

Life works in strange ways and those two years turned into 19 years.

During this time I had the opportunity also to be the managing director for Israir Airlines when they made an entry into the US. Unfortunately this route ceased due to the economic crisis in 2008.

Throughout the years many of my customers have said that they would like to travel with me to places other than Israel – until now, I never felt properly equipped to handle such requests.

For the past seven years I have diligently studied over 25 potential markets around the world and the possibility of conducting kosher tours there.

I have determined that now is the time to proceed in that direction.

There really are so many but some of the more exotic and interesting ones are: Bolivia, Uganda, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Southern France, Ireland and Scotland (Kosher Whiskey Tour), Vietnam and Cambodia, Peru and the Galapagos (Ecuador) and many more.

Obstacles [to organizing kosher tours to these locations] include making sure that all of our local suppliers – tour guides, hotels, and drivers, for example – understand the needs of the kosher traveler. This includes making sure that we have access to manual doors on Shabbat or someone to open the doors, making sure that we can get into the kitchens at the hotels properly to kasher them before cooking a meal or to properly re-heat food if it’s brought in prepared from a kosher caterer and making sure the housekeeping staff keep the lights on over Shabbat.

Read the complete interview.