The Failure of the Star Wars Hotel

The sheer absurdity of the 4 hour runtime impels me to watch the whole thing when I get a chance.

I found this by accident on YouTube the other day, and started watching it, not intending at all to sit through the 4+ hour runtime, but by the next day I'd watched the entire thing.

I'm not a Disney Parks person at all, but found the whole thing fascinating. Honestly, at first glance, this seems like such a fun idea, and given the popularity of other parks projects, I couldn't believe it'd failed. But digging in, it all kind of starts to fit together.

I didn't take notes, but off the top of my head:

* The stay was very expensive. You actually had to talk to an agent for specific pricing, but it was around $4k USD for two people for two days, with additional charges if you wanted to add people to your room.

* Despite luxury pricing, the rooms and furnishings are decidedly not. Tiny cabin-style rooms with bunk and pull out beds, and ~no amenities (no gym, no pool, etc.).

* The experience seems to have been a good idea, but executed poorly. This YT creator had trouble accessing any of the theoretically available storylines, and despite an effort to interact as much as possible ended up with results not discernible from random, or having done nothing at all.

* Lots of boring app-driven interactions involving messaging with virtual avatars of the IRL characters. On the day excursion to the rest of the Star Wars world, lots of of scanning QR codes on crates. The whole thing seems to have been very uninspired, and buggy to boot.

* When comparing the final product to concept art and statements from Disney execs, it seems like a lot of corners were cut for the final product and it ended up very underwhelming compared to what it was supposed to be. There seems to be lots of evidence elsewhere that Disney parks have really become cheapskate / penny pinching operations, and a reasonable hypothesis is that there were a lot of big ideas, but they would've been expensive, and they were slowly cut back one by one until the overall product really had nothing special left, and fell flat.

* From Disney's end, it didn't seem to scale very well. The high price tags seems to be related to the fact that the hotel didn't have all that many rooms compared to larger resorts which might have thousands, so they felt that they had to recoup the cost from each one. This didn't sit well with customers though, and after the initial opening period, the hotel seemed to be operating at high vacancy rate because few people were able/willing to pay the very substantial premium.

* Perhaps the biggest reason for its abrupt closure is due to accountants. Disney will be taking up to a $300 million tax write off from the project, so its closure may have been even a neutral or even good thing to its execs. The closure was extremely abrupt, which seems to suggest that they wanted to take the write off for the prior fiscal year specifically.