Now you no longer just visit fantasyland, you live in it. LEGOLAND California has two hotels right outside the Carlsbad theme park entrance—each with their own colorful themes, restaurants, pools, and playful features—from a disco elevator to a slide right in the lobby.
Both properties are designed with traveling families in mind. The hotels’ junior-suite-style rooms—emblazoned with colorful walls and LEGO models as art—have separate sleeping areas for grown-ups and kids. The kids’ quarters have bunk beds, their own TV, and a LEGO brick box for impromptu building. Both lobbies feature giant mosh pits full of plastic bricks, so kids can build away while grown-ups check in. Plus, all hotel guests enjoy both complimentary breakfast buffets and early entry into the park (up to an hour, depending on the season).
Choose your hotel based on the theme: the original, 250-room LEGOLAND Hotel offers four room themes—pirates, adventurers, LEGO friends, and Ninjago warriors—and larger-than-life LEGO sculptures, made with more than 3 million bricks, all over the hotel. Head into the Bricks Family Restaurant and neighboring Skyline Café, and check out the mini cityscape that has Spider-Man scaling a building and a wizard reading a book by a rooftop pool. Industrial-strength glue holds the sculptures together, so go ahead and touch. Outside, there’s a real pool, too, with soft LEGO bricks that can be used to build in the water. Meanwhile, don’t miss the hotel’s disco-themed elevator, which is nearly a ride in itself.
The LEGOLAND Castle Hotel, meanwhile, opened in 2018 with 250 rooms in three kingdom-oriented themes: wizards, knights, and princesses, with LEGO art ranging from owls to cats and fire-breathing dragons, and tiny star lights embedded in the ceiling over the kids’ bunk beds. The Castle’s lobby offers its own diversions, from the slide that runs parallel to a flight of stairs, a Knock Knock Door that tells jokes, and a small “dungeon” ready for photo ops. Its courtyard area has its own pool, a LEGO-stocked playground, and a big screen TV set on a small lawn, playing LEGO movies daily. The hotel’s Dragon’s Den restaurant has live entertainment (jesters who take requests when you spin the wheel on the wall), and a parent-friendly bar.
With either hotel, remind your kids to pack their LEGO Minifigures, which they can trade with staffers at the hotels or in the park.