The crash-and-burn launch of the Star Wars hotel will ultimately go down in the history books as a failure, but the bold, ambitious and audacious concept will help shape Disney’s immersive hotel, theme park and cruise ship experiences for decades to come.
Disney announced this week that the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel that opened just over a year ago at Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park in Florida will be closing in September.
SEE ALSO: Everything you need to know about Disney World’s Star Wars hotel
“Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser is one of our most creative projects ever and has been praised by our guests and recognized for setting a new bar for innovation and immersive entertainment,” according to a statement released by Disney. “This premium experience gave us the opportunity to try new things on a smaller scale of 100 rooms and we will take what we’ve learned to create future experiences that can reach more of our guests and fans.”
The “galactic cruise” invites costumed passengers to hatch plots against the First Order, fall in with a band of underworld smugglers and sip space cocktails for as long as they can suspend disbelief and buy into the interstellar cosplay theater of what’s been billed as the “most immersive Star Wars experience ever created.”
What went wrong? And what can Disney learn from this epic failure? Let’s take a closer look at seven reasons why Disney’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel failed.
1) A revolutionary idea ahead of its time
The Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser was a really big and innovative idea — at least as it was envisioned in the 1.0 version of the concept. Probably too big. And certainly way ahead of its time.
The Galactic Starcruiser combined two familiar ideas — each with a novel twist.
The first idea was the notion of a three-day cruise ship voyage. The twist? Your cruise ship was a Star Wars spaceship. Disney went to great lengths to get guests to buy into the storytelling concept that this otherwise ordinary 100-room Florida hotel was actually a cruise ship traveling through space.
The second idea was an immersive theater experience where the audience was part of the show and played a role in how the story unfolded. The twist? The show played out continuously during your 3-day, 2-night hotel stay.
Either one of those big ideas would have been daunting to introduce to a mass audience of theme park tourists. Combining the two together was more than most people could fathom — especially while they were supposed to be on vacation.
2) All inclusive vs. a la carte
The big problem with the cruise-ship-anchored-in-port concept is that you force hotel guests to pay up front for an all-inclusive experience. Everything is included in your stay — room, dinner, drinks, attractions, shows, atmospheric entertainment and theme park excursions.
Even though all the headlines said Disney’s Star Wars hotel is “closing” that’s not really the case. Disney will reimagine the hotel and come up with a simpler concept that will likely maintain a Star Wars theme.
Step one will almost certainly be to unbundle the all-inclusive cruise-like experiences and let hotel guests pick and choose from an a la carte menu of exclusive offerings. You don’t need lightsaber training but really want to see the dinner show? No problem.
Eventually, Disney may even offer a 3-day, 2-night cruise experience again — just not every day of the year.
3) One size fits all is not for everybody
An immersive theater experience can be a lot to handle — particularly if you’re new to the idea. It can be especially exhausting if the experience lasts throughout your entire hotel stay.
If you’ve ever been to a Renaissance Fair or Colonial Williamsburg, then you get the general idea of immersive theater. The show unfolds all around you all the time. That might be OK for some people in small doses. But the Galactic Starcruiser experience lasts for 45 hours.
The challenge for Walt Disney Imagineering with the 2.0 version of the Star Wars hotel will be balancing show times with down times. And figuring out where and when the shows will happen — and how to let hotel guests know when the shows begin and give them the option to opt out if that’s what they prefer.
4) An escape room with no escape
The idea of the Galactic Starcruiser experience was that you checked in for your voyage at Disney World and were whisked away to outer space for your Star Wars adventure — and you didn’t return until it was time to depart the spaceship and return to Disney World.
In between, you were mostly confined to the Galactic Starcruiser. Put another way, you never left the hotel — except for a brief excursion to Batuu, the intergalactic setting for the Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge themed land at Disney’s Hollywood Studios.
You could certainly leave the hotel. It wasn’t a prison. But why would you ever leave after paying for the full experience?
On a cruise ship, you’d never jump overboard in between ports — even if you were bored out of your mind. But the Galactic Starcruiser experience really wasn’t set up for you to come and go as you please — even if it turns out you’re really not that into Star Wars after all and just want to get out of the hotel for a few hours.
Getting rid of the cruise ship concept will allow future Star Wars hotel guests the freedom to return to Earth whenever they want.
5) Two niche groups with little overlap
Disney was appealing to two distinct groups that don’t necessarily overlap much on your classic Venn diagram.
The first group is the Disney World one-percenters who have money to burn and price is no object. The second group is the Star Wars one-percenters who think a 45-hour immersive experience in a galaxy far, far away sounds like a dream vacation.
Lowering the bar for entry on both fronts will open up Star Wars hotel 2.0 to a broader audience who may not be as financially well-heeled or deeply invested in the epic storytelling.
6) High costs and high prices
No conversation about the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser would be complete without discussing the out-of-this-world price tag.
The 3-day, 2-night experience costs anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000.
Disney positioned the hotel as a premium experience — but some of the costs were related to the sheer amount of labor involved in pulling off the audacious concept. There were actors, entertainers and characters around every corner and everywhere you looked. And not just for a 30-minute show, but throughout the entire 3-day, 2-night experience.
Trimming back the amount of entertainment and frequency should allow Disney to lower the price and allow more people to step inside the Star Wars hotel and experience the intergalactic adventure. A watered-down version of the Galactic Starcruiser will still be wildly appealing to the legions of Star Wars fans.
7) A failure narrative set in
The biggest problem for Disney after the initial buzz for the Galactic Starcruiser waned was that the vultures began circling waiting for the inevitable death of the grand experiment.
It is a uniquely American tradition to build things up beyond expectations and then tear them down at the first whiff of failure.
Disney had to know things were going south quickly. You don’t close a hotel after little more than a year unless you can see the writing on the wall.
The swift closure also allows returning Disney CEO Bob Iger to hang the Star Wars hotel failure like an albatross around the neck of fired Disney CEO Bob Chapek. During his short tenure, Chapek continually played the villain and likely will never get credit for the eventual innovations that come from the Galactic Starcruiser experiment.
Years and decades from now, Imagineering will talk about the lessons learned and ideas incorporated in future hotels, attractions, shows and experiences that had their origins in the Galactic Starcruiser. But it’s too soon for that right now.
There are two things Disney looks at above all else when it comes to any experience — whether it’s a hotel, theme park or cruise ship. The first is intent to return. Would you do it again? The second is word of mouth. Would you tell a friend?
Those two trend lines had to be going in the wrong direction for Disney to pull the plug so quickly on the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser. The knock on the experience was it was deluxe but not luxe — it wasn’t luxurious enough to justify the sky high price tag. And the buzz that first greeted the innovative hotel concept had turned to a death watch as occupancy levels steadily decreased and Disney started discounting.
What’s next for Disney’s Star Wars hotel? Walt Disney Imagineering will develop a new concept that is a little more inclusive and bit less exclusive — turning what was envisioned as a Club 33-like VIP experience for the elite and rich into a five-star Star Wars hotel geared toward hardcore fans who can’t get enough of the epic space opera.
