OUR HERSHEYPARK SEASON PASS EXPERIENCE- PART 3
For the 2025 season, our meal plans were valid at 22 food vendor locations throughout the park. These locations served entrées and sides. You cannot use your meal plan on snack-only vendors like the ice cream or pretzel shops. For most locations, each meal plan use got you an entrée and a side, but a small number of locations only provided an entrée.
Quantifying our meal spending through the plan turned out to be challenging at first. A few vendors seem to use a special menu item when someone uses a meal plan, because the price on the receipt in no way matched the cost of the entrée and side if bought without the meal plan. This forced me to take more pictures of menu boards to sort out the actual cost per meal later on. One vendor in particular may have even had a specific meal plan option not listed on the menu board. All this is to say that my meal plan value extraction calculations may not be as precise as the season pass category figures are.
The dining plan add-ons are applied directly to your season pass account. You go up to a participating vendor, tell them you have a dining plan, place your order, and they scan your season pass to confirm and finalize the transaction. For our two-meal dining plan, you had to wait at least three hours between meals. The dining plans are also only in effect during spring and summer visits. After Labor Day, the plan expires and you’re back to paying for your food.
Hersheypark posted a list of participating food vendors and their locations on the park website. I screenshot that list and referred to it often when we started thinking about meals in the park. Initially, we thought it might be fun to try to hit all participating vendors, but several vendors serve similar, if not identical items, and it’s hard to beat the Overlook Food Court for the amount of food you get and for the air conditioning. We ate there pretty often, but it fills up fast around peak meal times, so try to time your meals a little differently than everyone else. Time in the park should be spent on rides, not waiting in line for food.
While my family aimed for open-to-close each time we hit the park, we didn’t always stay for two meals. Some vendors have entrées and sides that really fill you up, and that can slow you down in the park. A full meal at the Overlook, Dispatch, or the Spring Creek Smokehouse will cause you to reevaluate your ride selection and possibly whether or not you’ll even need to eat dinner.
I give Hersheypark credit- at several vendors, you really get a lot of food for the money. There are a few places where you can get lighter fare like hot dogs or walking tacos, but you’re not getting ripped off at most of these places. That being said, it’s not hard to blow a lot of money on amusement park meals. It’s easy to spot on my spreadsheet the days when my family visited as a foursome and we ate two meals in the park. Seven of our nine visits during spring and summer as a foursome saw meal consumption in excess of $100 for the day. In fact, on those seven days, our average “spend” on meals alone was $123.65!
Of our 68 park admissions over the course of 2025, 52 of them occurred while our dining plans were in effect. By my best estimation, our total “spend” on meals during these admissions was $1,298.94 for an average “spend” of about $24.98 per admission. Days where we either ate light or only had one meal in the park really pull that average figure down.
Our initial investment was $568.12, and we consumed an estimated $1,298,94 worth of food while our plans were valid. That’s almost 2.3 times the value of the dining plan. Going into this experiment, I wasn’t sure that we could double our value on the dining plans. But we did. It took us five visits with two meals each visit to recoup our investment. Every visit after that saw us eating with house money.
We could have reached that break-even point faster or slower depending on where and what we ate each visit. That makes the dining plans trickier to win on, but it’s still a feasible pursuit. As my experience shows, it requires a little more legwork to capture the cost of your meals, but what’s a little math at mealtime every now and then?
FINAL NUMBERS
Let’s combine the value extraction figures for season passes and the dining plan add-on to reveal our total savings on this experiment:
Hersheypark Season Passes: $820.00
2-Meal Dining Plan Add-On: $568.12
TOTAL INITIAL EXPENSE: $1,388.12
Season Pass Value Extraction: $4,973.73
Dining Plan Value Extraction: $1,298.94
TOTAL VALUE EXTRACTION: $6,272.67
The season pass + meal plan value extraction is relatively easy to achieve. You just have to commit to going to Hersheypark often. A round-trip visit to Hersheypark is about 55 miles for my family. Of our 20 visits during our season pass year, 18 involved my wife or I driving one of our cars there and back. So, to get even more specific about the cost, we put 990 miles on our vehicles. This represents around three full tanks of gas in my car (thank goodness we weren’t paying 2026 gas prices!).
It is interesting to look at a map and visualize the kind of round-trip vacation destinations that we could have otherwise visited for 990 miles. But those would have been down and back trips that would have lasted a week at the most (I don’t have unlimited vacation time, after all!). By staying local, we made more than a week’s worth of vacation memories. We came out the other side true Hersheypark connoisseurs, and we figured out a few of our family’s favorite rides, which I will detail in my next post.
If the numbers I have presented don’t justify the investment of Hersheypark season passes, then I don’t know what will. It pays for itself after three visits and holds the potential for a lot of free value beyond that point if you are willing to pursue it!
Up Next: Our Top 10 Rides in the Park
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