Most places will have some sort of dinner. I interviewed at 12 places and each one had a dinner. Only one (Utah) had twice weekly meals. A couple were hosted in resident's homes, which was a nice change of pace (I put on a lot of weight during interview season!)
Generally I got out of most interviews between 3-4pm. Ohio State was done and back to the Hotel by 1:30 or 1:45 and had guaranteed late check out...which was absolutely amazing - by the end of the interview season you get pretty good at changing out of interview clothes quickly in a hotel lobby bathroom or at the airport, so the possibility of actually relaxing and taking a quick nap (you are a 4th year medical student after all) was awesome. If you are limited by early flight times, programs will absolutely accommodate you to make sure you make it out of town.
The best part of interviewing for peds is that the programs are all super nice - they have to be to compete with each other. I had free hotel rooms at 10 of 12 locations, and the other two offered decent discounts on rooms. Compared to my roommate who was interviewing for ENT programs, this saved me nearly a $1000. The other good thing is that there are so many more interview days. My ortho friends (at least the ones that actually were competitive for ortho) generally had to make some really tough decisions about which programs they wanted to interview at because the Ortho residencies might have only 4 or 5 interview days the entire process, and if you couldn't make it to one of those days, sorry. Very high stress indeed, trying to way all the variables of your chances for each program, your chances of matching elsewhere, if you think you'll like the program and so on...luckily not an issue in peds.
