Disney Gives Up on $3,000 a Night Star Wars Hotel
Disney #Disney
Huh. That’s weird. It turns out that a windowless hotel with no swimming pool that only allows guests to leave the grounds to go to one theme park for one afternoon … that can only be afforded by a tiny, wealthy, quickly-exhaustible fraction of a company’s larger fanbase … was not a brilliant business plan? The gag of it all.
Walt Disney World’s newest and highest-profile hotel, the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, will “make its final voyage” this September. Disney announced the news in an update on the hotel’s website, writing, “We are so proud of all of the Cast Members and Imagineers who brought Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser to life and look forward to delivering an excellent experience for Guests during the remaining voyages over the coming months. Thank you to our Guests and fans for making this experience so special.” Bookings are temporarily paused to accommodate visitors with plans after the final window of September 28-30, but will reopen on May 26 for people who wish to experience the Starcruiser before it’s docked for good.
The uniquely immersive hotel experience, which was ambitious in its premise and ultimately divisive in its execution, had only opened in March 2022. Billed as a “revolutionary 2-night experience where you are the hero” and “the most immersive Star Wars story ever created,” the Starcruiser is a hotel themed like a leisure spaceship in the Star Wars universe, functioning like a limited land-cruise, with set itineraries, meals, entertainment, and length-of-stay (two nights only).
What elevates the experience beyond the hotel’s elaborate theming is a participatory element: staff are all in-character, and guests are encouraged to take the side of the Rebel Alliance or First Order, in a real white-hat black-hat Westworld situation. Over the course of the “cruise,” performers enact a plot line in which guests could participate through experiences like lightsaber training and trying to extract intel from walk-around characters.
This all sounds like Star Wars fan heaven, but at price points that reach around $6,000 for a one-room, two-night stay for a family of four, it is simply untenable for a majority of potential visitors. While that rate includes meals and one-day park admission to Disney’s Hollywood Studios (home of their Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge park) $3,000 is extremely steep for a hotel that doesn’t even offer basic amenities like a pool or bathrobes; and if you want to cosplay, which is presumably part of the immersion, it’s going to cost a whole lot more. In contrast, a stay at the Waldorf Astoria Orlando, a true luxury resort, will run visitors around $450 a night during much of the year. Even if guest satisfaction rates at the Starcruiser were high, the price point and the specificity of the experience made the customer pool rather limited.
The resort followed a pattern under former CEO Bob Chapek of huge price hikes at the company’s American resorts and theme parks that vastly outpaced regular inflation. It especially stung that Disney was focusing so much of its resources on this exclusive immersive experience while remodeling its other, more affordable hotels to make them less immersive. Breaking the news, theme park reporter Scott Gustin tweeted, “Disney says it will focus resources on opportunities that will be more accessible to a larger group of its fans.”
Somehow, this isn’t even technically the biggest news out of Disney today. The New York Times reports that the company has pulled the plug on Lake Nona Town Center, a nearly $1 billion Orlando office complex project that would have brought thousands of jobs to the area. Many of these jobs would be Disney creatives relocated from California. Disney CEO Bob Iger and Parks chairman Josh D’Amaro appear to have canceled Lake Nona in direct response to increasing antagonism from Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis. Last month, the media giant sued the hard-right theocrat for “government retaliation.” This news comes one day after DeSantis signed a series of anti-LGBTQ+ bills that would deeply limit the personal rights and freedoms of minority groups, and includes a bill that will allow the state to remove children from their homes if their parents provide them with access to gender-affirming care. Call him Ron DarthSantis.