Parks that have accommodations on-site are always looking for ways to put “heads in the beds.” The folks at Hershey Park have accomplished this with an easy-to-emulate promotion that routinely sells out and brings the families back year after year. The promotion is called “Breakfast at the Park.” For one price, guests get their accommodations, park admission, breakfast with the park’s themed characters, and early admission.

The park started the promotion in the mid-1990s to encourage guests to think about more than just Hershey Park when they planned their trip to Hershey, says Kathleen Fitch, the public relations manager for Hershey Resorts.

“We wanted to create a package for families—which is what our destination is all about—that would entice guests with both the resort experience and the park experience,” Fitch says. “Doing it as a package makes it a lot easier for the guests—everything is included. They don’t have to go buy separate tickets for this and that.”

To take advantage of the promotion, guests must stay at any of the Hershey Resorts properties: the Hershey Lodge, the Hotel Hershey, or the Hershey High Meadow Campground.

Guests buy the package when they book their rooms. When they check in, the front desk delivers their package, which includes their tickets to the park and their seating assignments at the restaurant.

The next morning, a shuttle bus picks up the guests at 7:15 and takes them to the Chocolate Town Café, a themed restaurant just outside Hershey Park’s main gate. At least three of the park’s characters are waiting at the bus stop to greet guests. After a photo opportunity with the families, the characters lead them inside, where the restaurant staff shows each family to its table. The breakfast itself is served on a buffet with the usual items—scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, potatoes, cereals, pastries, and fruit—and a few items that go with the territory, such as chocolate chip pancakes and chocolate waffles.

While the families eat, the characters roam from table to table accompanied by “Mr. Music,” a singer and guitarist who entertains the families during their meals, says Sharon Waltz, the manager of Chocolate Town Café. “He gets the kids up and gets them involved with dancing with the characters and makes sure they have a good time,” she says. “Then at the end he invites them to come up and sing with him. He says, ‘If you are done, and only if Mom and Dad say you are done, you can come up here and sing with us.’ The characters take the kids by the hand and join in the fun. He gets 90 percent of them up there.”

Breakfast is usually over by 8:45 and the families are then allowed into the park, which does not open to the public until 10 a.m. One section of the park is opened early, the Midway America section, which has games and kid-oriented rides.

The Breakfast at the Park promotion runs Monday through Friday from the last Monday in June through the third Monday in August, Waltz says. “We get most of our guests from New York, and their schools are not out until the middle of June. The first couple of years that we did it, we started in the beginning of June, and it did not fill up. This way, it fills up for us.”

The Chocolate Town Café is not open for breakfast to the public, and the promotion is limited to 180 people, which is the restaurant’s capacity. “I am sold out almost every day of the summer,” Waltz says.

Waltz usually books the tables first come, first served, and as the packages are reserved. She has learned through experience to assign the tables ahead of time. “Otherwise, you get a family of three sitting at a table for six or eight, and then you don’t have any tables for your bigger groups. . . . I have some people who call in and say, ‘Sharon, I’m coming this day, can I have this table’ and of course we accommodate them. And if someone says, ‘I want to sit with the Jones party,’ then I add up both groups and give them a table together.”

Hershey Resorts uses interns to manage the program every year, Fitch says. “They are brought on in May and they have a month and a half to get familiar with the program. Then they coordinate the advertising in the local market, and they run the program. They are responsible for the tickets; each intern is responsible for a different park property, to pick up the guests and talk to them on the bus during the trip to the restaurant about what to expect for the day, and then they stay with the guests through breakfast and lead them into the park.”

Waltz says that families like the promotion because it includes early admission. But, she says, there’s no question what the kids like best about it. “You see them getting off the bus and see their eyes light up when they see the characters—it’s awesome.”

—Frank Elliott