Sometimes the best trips you take are the most impromptu ones! On the Saturday before Christmas, I decided that I was antsy and needed to get away somewhere. After quickly pricing out flights to go down to our usual Disney getaway and realizing there was no way that was happening (thanks expensive Christmas flights), I started to look into other options and I realized we could take a quick road trip to Hershey, PA (about two hours from where we live). Trying to piece together work schedules and making sure we were around to celebrate the holiday with those we loved, we settled on going Sunday the 22nd through Tuesday the 24th. This was my kids and my first time in Hershey. Check out everything we did below and our reviews!

Where Did We Stay?

Fairfield Inn & Suites Harrisburg Airport: The first night of our trip, the Hershey Lodge was NOT available so we chose to stay at another hotel nearby. We were able to find the Fairfield Inn & Suites Harrisburg Airport at a great rate. It was about 20 minutes away from Hershey Park. Parking was free and the room was perfect for a quick stay. Bonus: They had a great free breakfast consisting of waffles, eggs, sausage, bacon, hard-boiled eggs, cereal, yogurt, and fruit!

Hershey Lodge: There are three options to stay on Hershey property - The Hershey Lodge, The Hershey Hotel, or the Hershey Campground. Clearly, the campground was out because my idea of camping is more “glamping.” We considered both the Hershey Hotel and the Hershey Lodge. The Hershey Hotel is the more upscale of the two options and when I originally came up with the idea, I thought we’d stay there but when looking at the options at both hotels, price aside, the Hershey Lodge completely won. The Hershey Lodge has the Water Works Water Park, which for our family, was the clear winner!

What we loved about the Hershey Lodge:
- Parking was free! We stayed in the Kisses Tower and our car was a quick 5 minute walk from our room which was very convenient. Quick note though to make sure to take note on how to get back to your car. We may have had to ask for directions ;)
- The bathroom amenities: This seems like such a silly thing to mention but we loved that the shampoo/conditioner/soap was infused with chocolate! Not only did it smell delicious but it actually did a great job on our hair.
- Fire & Grain Restaurant: We got take out from the Fire & Grain restaurant and had it back in our room after going to the water park. Everyone was happy with their food - from the chicken fingers my kids had to my braised pork to my husbands cheesesteak pannini! The pricing was reasonable for the kids meals (I believe $8-9 for the normal kids meal while my braised pork kids meal was $16); though I did think the adult entrees were on the higher side!
- Hershey Grill: This was my daughters’ favorite meal - S’mores French Toast! They both fell absolutely in love with it and loved having s’mores for breakfast! Quick note about the Hershey Grill: you have to go OUTSIDE to get there. No one told us this and we were heading to the pool after breakfast so we were very cold getting there! The service was great and quick, though, and they got a cute Hershey picture to color to keep them entertained.
- Water Works Water Park: This was the #1 favorite for my kids for sure! Water Works has three separate play areas - a small splash area with slides for the littlest kids, a very shallow pool with waterfall features, and a regular pool with Reese’s Water Walk. In addition to this, they have two slides that you can go on and a hot tub for the adults (where I spent most of my time!)! My older daughter spent most of her time trying to master Reese’s Water Walk, while my younger water-baby spent most of her time hanging in the pool! My older daughter did the slides and said they were fun and the lines were very short each time she did it. Quick note: We felt like the pricing at the snack shop by the pool was very expensive. When we compared pricing to room service, a lot of the room service items were less expensive!

Hershey World

We spent our first full day at Hershey World (Admission to Hershey World is FREE). We had pre-booked the Adventure 1 Bundle for all four of us (at time of writing $43/adult and $36/child). With the Adventure 1 Bundle you get the following included: 4D Chocolate Movie, Trolley Works Ride (We had the choice of the Holly Jolly Trolley, Sweet Lights Trolley, or Historical Trolley), Create Your Own Candy Bar, and Hershey’s Unwrapped. We also chose to add on the $10 Meal Package to each of our tickets. It also included free parking (Hershey’s Chocolate World has free parking for up to 3 hours but after that you have to pay for parking unless you get it included in the package). When you pre-book the Adventure Bundle, you will schedule your times for each of the activities (but you CAN reschedule when you get there if you need to — I forgot to schedule in time to eat and they were great at working with us for new times!). We had also pre-booked Decorate with Mrs. Claus ($15/pp) for this day! Descriptions of each event below:

Hershey’s Unwrapped: Hershey’s Unwrapped is the newest show to come to Hershey World. In the show, you learn about the 5 Senses of Chocolate and each person who attends gets a tasting kit (inside the tasting kit is several mini chocolate bars, Hershey kisses, and a full-size chocolate bar as well as a certificate all inside a nice tin case!). The show has two parts to it and is very cute. My girls both enjoyed the show and it kept their attention by asking them to taste as they went on. In addition, they sought audience participation which kept the girls’ attention. The show was approximately 45 minutes.

Chocolate Tour: The Chocolate Tour is the only FREE thing included at Hershey World is the Hershey Tour. This is about a 10-15 minute moving ride where they take you through how chocolate is made. It’s a fun little tour and definitely nice to be able to go and do it for free! Despite being very crowded, the line does move pretty quickly. It would say we waited about 15 minutes in line.

Hershey Holly Jolly Trolley Tour: As I mentioned above, with the package we could choose the Sweet Lights Trolley, historical trolley tour or Holly Jolly Trolley Tour (being that we had already bought tickets for the Sweet Lights and would do that on our own). Being that we were all about the Christmas Spirit on this trip, we chose the Holly Jolly Trolley Tour. You will board a heated trolley at Hershey’s World that takes you around the town of Hershey. On the tour you can see the Kisses Street Lights, the Milton Hershey School, the home where Hershey grew up, and more. Along the way, you have a “snow princess” guide that sings songs with you (song lyrics provided) and make several stops and hear from a “factory worker”, “Milton’s mother” and even “Santa” (all played by the same actor). At the end, Santa gives each child a Hershey Trolley Works ornament and each adult a kazoo to use for the last song. This trolley ride was very cute and we did learn some new things about Hershey. I would say my girls were about the top of the age range I would recommend it for. I would have really liked to do the Original Trolley Tour (described as Hershey history presented in a theatrical way) but that one only runs Memorial Day through Labor Day so we’ll have to do that next time!

One quick note about the Trolley Tour —- You have to get your Trolley ticket validated at the Trolley desk inside of Hershey World before you get in line for the Trolley (even if you have pre-purchased the trolley ticket!). It didn’t say that anywhere on our ticket and we were second in line and luckily my girls’ father got back quick enough from validating that we didn’t lose our spot because my girls really wanted back of the trolley seats!

Decorate with Mrs. Claus: This was an extra that we purchased (not included with the Adventure 1 Bundle). This is a seasonal event and is offered several times a day. In my opinion, this was a great value for the money. It is a 45 minute event located inside a private room in Hershey’s Chocolate World. Immediately when you are seated (seats are assigned so all families have space to sit together), the Reese’s and Hershey’s guy and Mrs. Claus come around to take photos and talk to the kids. The first thing you do when arriving is make ornaments (they tell a whole story on how it’s the last tree at Hershey World that is undecorated and they need your help!). Each person is provided with a wood ornament to decorate and the table has markers, stickers, and gems that they can use on the ornaments. When finished, everyone puts their ornaments on the tree (see Hershey’s above helping my daughter find the perfect spot) and they go into how great it is to have the last tree decorated (you do, of course, take your ornaments home at the end!).

After decorating ornaments, Mrs. Claus invites all the kids to the floor in front of her where she teaches about decorating cookies. She does a really cute story here, too, and the kids were engaged and very much enjoying it. After that, each person gets a cookie and a small container of icing, small container of sprinkles, and small container of mini kisses. My kids are cookie decorating pros but did enjoy doing this as well; however, neither of my kids liked their cookies and did not eat them (I will say that my mom is the best baker so my kids are VERY much cookie snobs!). My husband ate his and said they’re “not the greatest”.

I personally really enjoyed this activity. I thought that it was very well run, entertaining, and engaging. For $15/person, it was definitely worth it in my opinion.

4D Chocolate Movie: I didn’t take any photos of this one because it was, well, a movie so you get extra pictures from around Hershey World above ;) Before the movie, you are in a room where the person running the movie engages the crowd, finds out any special events (encourages texting anything special going on to a specific number), and introduces you to Kisses, Reese’s and Hershey who are trying to solve a mystery. They ask for your help in solving the movie and let you into the theater. The movie engages with the audience by asking the audience questions and responding to them and there are special 4-D effects during the movie (for example, different smells, being spritzed with water, and feeling like someone is grabbing or punching your legs). My kids were NOT a fan of the 4-D effects of this movie (Frankly, neither was I and kept my legs up because it felt odd to me!) but the movie itself was really cute in my opinion. Again, there was great audience engagement and the story line was good. It was definitely the leg grabbing that freaked out my kids so if you have little ones that wouldn’t like that, just encourage them to sit criss-cross-applesauce in their seats!

Create Your Own Candy Bar: This was definitely a highlight for my girls —- What chocolate lover doesn’t want to create their own candy bar and watch it in production! You start by putting on hair nets and aprons (my little one was NOT happy about this part!). The next thing you do is take your ticket and go to the first set of kiosks where you will input your name and email address. Each person scans their own ticket so they are each doing the work for their own bar. Next you choose how you want your chocolate bar to be made. You have the choice to have the base of your bar be milk, dark, or white chocolate. You can then choose up to 3 of the following 6 toppings: chocolate chips, cookie pieces, butterscotch chips, krispy pieces, pretzel, toffee chips to be added to the top of your chocolate bar. After that, your bar is covered in milk chocolate and you can choose to have sprinkles on top or not have sprinkles on top. You can then pull the level and start your chocolate bar going down the assembly line and watch as it goes through each process. It will show your name that you input in the beginning so you can follow along with your bar’s process. Towards the end of the process, you can go to another kiosk where you can design the cover for your chocolate bar from pre-selected or make-your-own covers.

The chocolate bars come out and you are given them in a beautiful tin wrapped in your own specific wrapping. The whole process took, I would guess, between 45 minutes and an hour (we had a huge group in front of us and I think it slowed things down for us). My girls absolutely loved this and the chocolate is absolutely delicious. On a personal note, I was hoping for more topping choices (I really wanted to make a s’mores chocolate bar!) but I can see how it is necessary to limit the toppings available since it’s all done by machine and you’d have to have additional machinery for extra toppings. The price of doing this on it’s own is $26.95 which IMO, is absolutely crazy and I don’t think I would ever pay that but having it included in the Adventure 1 Package made it worth it for us!

Final Thoughts on Hershey’s World:
- We really did love our time at Hershey’s World. I absolutely, 100% believe that buying the Adventure 1 Bundle is worth it’s money if you really want to experience everything that Hershey’s World has to offer. It’s absolutely a money savings and when you pre-buy it, you don’t feel like you are constantly shelling out more money.
- Hershey’s World has a HUGE Hershey’s store…. if you want any Hershey’s product, this is the place to find it. They had some really cute specialty holiday bars that I wish that we had bought as gifts (when I thought about it, I checked the Hershey Lodge gift shop and they didn’t have it). My kids found about a billion things they wanted but we did not actually let them buy anything (it was easy to distract them with all the activities going on!).
- We spent about 7 hours total doing all the above activities! You can definitely spend a full day here!
- Hershey’s World was decorated beautifully for the holidays. My girls particularly loved the tunnel of lights and danced and skipped through it (it does go on and off though so getting the perfect picture is not easy LOL).
- Santa is at Hershey’s World!! As crowded as Hershey’s World was (and IMO it was VERY crowded), there was only one person in front of us to see Santa (I don’t know if we got lucky or what!). You could take your own photos (though, there is not much room to move) or you could buy photos. I am a sucker and totally bought the photo package.
- Food: We bought the $10 food voucher that is included as an add-on. There are several food stations to choose from to use it on: Hot Food Station (choice of Pulled Pork or Chicken Fingers with Sides), Sandwiches, Soups, and Pizza. We found the food voucher to be between a $4-6 savings per person depending on what each person got. It covered our entire lunch and drink. One thing I have to note: I was NOT a fan of the food. I found that the macaroni and cheese at the hot food station tasted like water and I didn’t like the pulled pork. My daughter liked her pizza (I tried a bite — it was nothing to write home about). In fact, the only one who loved his food was my girls’ father who got a Chicken Salad Wrap. If you are going to be there the whole day, though, you really don’t have any other choice except to only eat chocolate LOL
- Speaking of eating chocolate…my kids probably could have lived on a diet of chocolate this day. Everywhere we turned they were getting mini candy bars.
- We did splurge at the end and get some desserts to bring with us as we were heading to the Sweet Lights next. We sampled the cookies, cupcakes, and Cookie Dough Desserts and they all got rave reviews from our crew!

Hershey’s Sweet Lights

After a long day at Hershey’s World, we decided to check out Hershey’s Sweet Lights. We had previously bought tickets online. Note that ticket pricing is less Monday-Thursday so if you want to go and can make that work, that would be ideal. Also if you’re staying on property, you can get slightly discount tickets (Like under $5 off) at the Concierge. We hadn’t yet gone to the Lodge and were staying off-site the first night so buying them online was just easier. Sweet Lights is advertised as more than 2 miles of lights that you enjoy from the comfort of your car. They have a radio station that you can tune into which plays Christmas music (which there’s one part where the light tunnel and Christmas trees leading up to it are synced to the music on the station).

While the display was okay and if your kids are VERY into lights, this might be more worthwhile, for our family, it was a bit of a bust. It was VERY, very crowded and the way the display is in two sections makes the traffic much worse. It took us a solid hour to get through the display and my kids lost interest very quickly. A lot of the display is very close to the car so it’s hard to tell in some of them what you’re actually looking at so that didn’t help at all. They do have different sections and there are some great things to see, but overall, not a highlight for my family!

The Hershey Story Museum

I was pretty excited that with our hotel stay we got complimentary tickets to the Hershey Museum (normal price $13.50 for adults and $9.50 for children). I made sure before going to check out everything that I could and did see that there was some extras that I would want to pay for when there including:
- Apprentice Program: $3/per person (only one person needs to pay for this if you just want one book. We just paid for it for our oldest)
- Chocolate Lab: $13.50/per adult and $9.50/per child
- Little Elves Workshop: $5/per person (adults do NOT need to pay for this)

Unlike Hershey’s World, you CANNOT book these items in advance and everything is done when you arrive at the museum. You can, however, check out the full schedule of special events (including which chocolate lab classes are happening, times for the little elves workshop, and any other special events) on the Hershey Story Museum Website.

The Hershey Story Museum: The Hershey Story Museum is located upstairs in the building. It is an exhibit that takes you through the different stages of Milton Hershey’s story - from failure to great success - and the ways that he used his success to help others. There are a ton of things to see, stories to read, artifacts to look at. My girls really went through the museum in two different ways:

- My Older daughter (10) did the apprentice program. As I said above, this is $3 and can be purchased at the front of the museum. They give you a book which lists the different sections of the museum and asks you questions that you find the answers to in the different parts of the museum. You get your answer checked by a staff member after each section and they will correct it and when all right, will add something different to your book (for example, Hershey’s business card, a sticker, an emboss, a stamp). We found the staff members to be very engaging with my daughter and very helpful when she needed help. They really seemed to love what they do and wanted to get the kids into the story as well. At the end, once she had all the answers, she received a MS Hershey Apprentice Coin.

- My younger daughter (6) enjoyed using the wood coin to hear stories. When you first get to the museum, you get a wood coin which you will go to a kiosk and personalize with your name (each kid could have had their own coin but my older had the apprentice book so it was fine to share!). There are kiosks located in each room (as shown above) where when you scan the coin, it will tell you a story about Hershey. I believe, it was three stories at each kiosk so make sure you encourage your kids to keep scanning! At the end of the museum, you get to deposit your coin into a machine with different ways that you can help (community, children, and a few other categories) and then it pops up with a personalized image of your support (as shown in the last photo above)

My family enjoyed the museum and really spent time exploring it (the programs above helped keep my girls’ interest) but we did see other families go through it very quickly. I would say that it took us about 1.5 hours to get through the whole museum. In fact, we spent so much time at the Main Exhibit that we ran out of time to go to the Special Exhibit about Hershey and Cuba that was located downstairs.

The Chocolate Lab: The Chocolate Lab is an extra that you can purchase at The Hershey Story Museum. When you check their schedule, they have lots of different themed Chocolate Lab classes available throughout the day. These cannot be pre-booked and must be booked when you arrive. My girls chose to do the Reindeer Chocolate class. The cost was $13.50 per adult and $9.50 per child. In this 45 minute class, you get to learn about chocolate making and make your own chocolate in whatever the theme is (or go off the theme and do your own thing). You also receive a history on chocolate and how it’s made and even get to taste the “nibs” that chocolate comes from! We really enjoyed doing this class.

Little Elves Workshop: This is a Christmas time event at The Hershey Story Museum and one of my very favorite things! For only $5 per person (adults do NOT have to pay for this unless they want to make their own ornament), you get edible chocolate dough which you roll out and cut in whatever design you want. They then get to decorate their ornament with icing in whatever way they want. Lastly, you decorate a box to put your ornament in to give it time to try and they put a ribbon on top of the box with a sticker for when it’s dried. This activity didn’t take long but for only $10, my girls each got to make an ornament that we now proudly hang on our tree, we got a keepsake, and it was a great memory. In addition to the ornament making, they have a small toy selection that is great for babies/toddlers and a cute setup where you can take holiday photos!

See Similar Content: