The incredibly immersive – and incredibly expensive – Star Wars Hotel in Disney World is CLOSING. Why is Disney World bringing an end to one of their most ambitious and unique projects to date?

There’s a lot more going on than just that $6,000 price tag…

The Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser may only have celebrated its one year anniversary three months ago, but this experiment will be short lived as Disney has announced that the 2-day immersive experience/hotel will be closing later this year. What happened? Is this a major failure on Disney’s part? Did they misjudge their audience? We’re taking a look at what went wrong, and what went right.

Galactic Starcruiser is Closing

The final voyage for the Star Wars Hotel will be September 28th-30th, 2023. Here’s the statement Disney released: “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. This premium, boutique experience gave us the opportunity to try new things on a smaller scale of 100 rooms, and as we prepare for its final voyage, we will take what we’ve learned to create future experiences that can reach more of our guests and fans.”

What Is (or Was) the Galactic Starcruiser?

This question might be one of the reasons this thing never really caught on. Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser is a two-day, two-night all-inclusive, totally immersive, part murder-mystery-dinner-theater, part escape room, part cruise, part choose your own adventure game, and it’s all set within the Star Wars universe (specifically the events happening between the last two films of the sequel trilogy).

But, if you ask people who have been on it…that explanation really doesn’t capture what the experience really is. It’s something very hard to explain, especially to someone who isn’t interested in role play games or immersive theater.

The marketing surrounding Galactic Starcruiser didn’t quite manage to show you what to expect, especially in the first few promo spots – Disney actually scrapped their initial “first look” promos due to incredibly negative backlash, and the reputation of the Starcruiser never really recovered.

Why Is It Closing?

Negative Publicity

The Galactic Starcruiser got a LOT of flack starting back in August 2021 when they first announced pricing for the two-day trip. Before that though, people were excited, but that $4,000-$6,000 sample pricing shocked a lot of people, and the reality of how much you’d end up spending to step into the Star Wars universe suddenly made this potential future vacation a pipe dream or bucket list trip for a lot of people.

Those initial promos made matters worse when things didn’t fit into what people expected to see from this experience. Die hard fans were worried it wouldn’t live up to their expectations, the hype, and that price tag. And critics lambasted the design for looking cheap and not very Star Wars-y.

Things improved a little once the Galactic Starcruiser actually opened in March 2022, but it became very clear, very quickly, that this is a very specific vacation for a very specific group of people – even if that group is absolutely LOVING it, this hotel still wasn’t for everyone.

Niche

The main audience for this hotel is the major Star Wars fans – maybe they won’t bat an eye at that price tag, but a lot of them were saving up since that initial 2017 announcement of this project. Alongside those super fans, you’ve got the hardcore Disney fans, the curious people who have money to burn on a vacation, and lots of folks in between.

The Starcruiser had to be a LOT of things for a LOT of different people, and with a focus on higher end dining, few activities for little kids, and a fast-paced FOMO-inducing storyline that you had to arrive READY to experience or be OK with missing a lot of value, there’s practically no way it could tick all the boxes for such a varied group of people. And at that price tag, it’s pretty crucial to tick as many boxes as possible (or risk gaining more negative feedback).

Price

Yes, without a doubt the Starcruiser is expensive – we’ve compared it to a Disney Cruise, priced out how much the components of the trip would cost individually, and while you can definitely make the argument that this vacation could be 100% worth it…a $6,000 two-day trip for a group of four is still a tough pill to swallow.

Disney has been offering discounts for some affinity groups – Disney Vacation Club, Disney Visa Card holders, and Annual Passholders all had offers of 30% off for dates into September 2023. This may have been a test to see if lower prices would actually help fill bookings, as this is Disney’s bread and butter group of vacationers who are more likely to take advantage of a discount than a wider audience.

Reduced pricing paired with reducing the number of sailings was already starting to sound some alarms that this hotel might not being doing quite as well as Disney hoped. Originally, the Starcruiser had check-ins every single day of the week, but that got bumped down to just two or three sailings a week earlier this year. And cue the negative publicity once again. The fact of the matter is, this is an incredibly complex operation to run, and the costs for Disney were likely starting to become a stress point.

Complexity

The Starcruiser experience spans technically three days – you would check in at 1PM on the first day, spend two nights at the hotel, and check out by 10AM on day three. The entire cast, including most (if not all) of the waitstaff, guest relations Cast Members – basically ANYONE you would interact with during your stay – was the same for the entire duration.

With stories that take two days to tell and a full cast of eight main characters, it is tough to ensure continuity for the guests and create a sustainable work schedule with enough backup performers to keep the whole thing running.

The Walt Disney Company is in the midst of some rough times right now, with streaming and general film production revenue down in the past few quarters. The theme parks are still the same money-makers they’ve always been, but demand for Disney World vacations is starting to weaken. Disney World may be tightening the belt for a time to help prepare for the immediate future when fewer people may be visiting the theme parks, and the Galactic Starcruiser was first to the chopping block.

Disney promised investors they’d be cutting costs by $5.5 billion, but with stock prices continuing to fall, and streaming continuing to operate at a loss, the company doesn’t have room to be running more operations at a loss right now.

In the wake of 6,000 employee layoffs and the decision to cancel Disney’s Lake Nona office project in Orlando, Disney is definitely reining in spending and reducing budgets across the company, even in the theme park sectors which have traditionally performed well.

What’s Next?

Many people are going to brand the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser as a failure – and there are plenty of merits to that point, but let’s take a look at what else happened:

• Disney dipped a toe into something incredibly complex, interesting, new, and exciting.
• It was 100% an experiment that didn’t work out exactly as planned – but how many innovative, envelope-pushing, nobody’s-ever-done-this-before shots do? They tried something HUGE and they learned from it.
• Disney now knows the shortcomings, the troubles, and potentially how to make something like this happen again in the future on a more sustainable level.

Disney has made no announcement yet of what may become of the hotel.

• Could it become a regular hotel that anyone can book for a single night or 14+ nights without all the story lines and characters?
• Could the restaurant inside open for an immersive dinner theater?
• Could it just be a regular restaurant with a Star Wars flair and maybe blue shrimp?
• Could Disney try again with a different franchise? Or a different storyline within the Star Wars universe?

We’ll have to wait and see what Disney does with this space, but we think this level of innovation on Disney’s part is something we should commend even if the Galactic Starcruiser is no longer sailing.

If you are itching to go on one last trip aboard the Starcruiser, booking reopened for those final dates scheduled for this summer but they have quickly sold out. Disney has said that more availability could open up from time to time, so we suggest you keep checking back if you have your heart set on this experience before it closes. And reach out to our friends at Small World Vacations if you need any help with booking (they’re wonderful & experienced travel agents).

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The post Why the Star Wars Hotel Closed in Disney World first appeared on the disney food blog.