Walt also had originally contracted with third-parties to run all food operations at Disneyland until he decided Disney could do it better and stay much truer to the Disney name.
I've never heard of that before. Nowhere in any of the books I've read or material available about the early years of Disneyland was there mention of outside parties running restaurants at Disneyland, let alone running "all food operations" at Disneyland. There were certainly sponsors for some restaurants, and many remain, but the employees were "Cast Members". The lone exception could be
Don Defore's Silver Banjo Barbeque, which operated in Frontierland from 1957 to 1961 and was a location Walt was thrilled to have his good friend Mr. Defore operate during that time. It opened two years after Disneyland opened and, so it wasn't an opening day neccesity on Walt's part by any stretch.
What Walt did however was let an outside third-party build a big hotel across the street from Disneyland. The Disneyland Hotel was run by the Wrather Corporation from 1956 to 1988. Walt let them use the Disneyland name and logo on all of their materials, and 99% of people didn't even know it wasn't run by Walt and his company. Walt even allowed the Disneyland Monorail to stop at the non-Disney-owned Disneyland Hotel when he expanded the beamway in 1961.
When Walt's brother Roy and hand-picked predeccesors shepherded Walt Disney World through design and construction in the five long years between Walt's death in '66 and WDW's opening in '71, they got into the hotel business rather reluctantly. They allowed national hotel chains to set up shop at the adjacent Lake Buena Vista development to beef up the number of rooms available to WDW visitors.
When those same Walt succesors set up Tokyo Disneyland in the late 1970's and early 80's, they followed the exact same model. They focused on the park, and they let Hilton and Sheraton and major Japanese hotel chains build massive hotels on Disney property directly adjacent to Tokyo Disneyland. Only with the opening of DisneySea in 2001 did a new generation of Disney executives finally get into the hotel business in Tokyo.
In the late 1980's Michael Eisner finally bought the Disneyland Hotel from the Wrather Corporation at great expense, as hotel ownership was an important part of Eisner's strategy for the parks.
And then we all know where that led Eisner a few years later, with the infamous story of Euro Disneyland radically overbuilding its hotel infrastructure to support a single park in Paris. The poor financial models that all of those unused hotels saddled the Euro Disney project with led to its quick financial crisis in the mid 1990's, and it still struggles today with massively refinanced debt and Arabian sheiks holding the reigns of that property.
I am in no way a fan of Jay Rasulo, let me make that clear. But when you look at this Four Seasons news historically, what he is doing here is more in line with how Walt and his immediate predecessors ran their resort properties. The Disney-owned hotel business on a huge scale is something that only came along in the late 1980's after Eisner had amassed great power within the company.
If anything, this will force the Grand Floridian and some of the other Deluxe resorts to kick it up a notch when it comes to service and polish. WDW's Deluxe properties need some help there, and if the Four Seasons sets a new standard for deluxe service on Disney property, then that will be a good thing.
