News Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser Permanently Closed Fall 2023

[Ghost93]

I can say with certainty, ZERO.

I watched the full four hours.

I think since she broke the video up into various chapters different viewers will click on aspects that interest them. Star Wars fans will probably be more interested in the recap of the ride experience itself. Disney Parks fans will be more likely to check out the lengthy segments talking about how the company has slowly dwindled and devalued its theme park experience over the years.

 

[fgmnt]

My reaction, as well. Looks like a classic case of a flawed design that is recognized as a flawed design but that gets too far down the line for pulling the plug or engaging in a redo to be politically possible.

I think the sense of malaise I have felt when interacting with the company’s creative products over the last 10 years can be described as “the individual items collected together are less than the sum of its parts”. SWGS seems to have further devolved into having individual elements that intersected so poorly when given the chance to work together, it lays bare the fundamental misunderstanding and occasional contempt the executive class and upper management have for the product they are selling.

 

[fgmnt]

How confusing and bad the booking process was

This is something that really stood out to me: pointing out that the company’s penchant for nickel and diming infected this already incredibly expensive and premium experience, and core issues with the infrastructure of the experience that started before you even got on the elevator to the ship. The outdoor queue into the facility in the WW2 bunker shows how not thought out the nuts and bolts of the hotel experience was. Would have been relatively trivial to build an airport lounge style environment “on land” or alternatively, take your luggage and grant the free admission into DHS that morning and give you a report time to get on the spaceship from GE to GS.

 

[Sirwalterraleigh]

I like Jennie's content.

However, a 30k view for someone with 1.1M subs isn't that substantial.

And 30k is the number of people who visit the MK in just one day... a light day.

In other words, this is not a significant data point for Disney.

There’s tumbleweed rolling through the magic kingdom
These days…you should swing by…

Also…this:

How a 4-Hour Video About Disney's Failed 'Star Wars' Hotel Took Over the Internet

YouTuber Jenny Nicholson's deep dive into a Disney flop is long, obsessively detailed, and nerdy as hell. It also may be the best thing on the internet.

www.rollingstone.com

 

[Sirwalterraleigh]

OK, can nobody here just admit it was a massive, stupid miscalculation, and failed miserably…?!?!?!
WTH…?!?!?!?!?!

…but don’t you know it’s DISNEY????

I don't think anyone is arguing that and in fact fully agrees with it. Clearly failed.

It can be a wonderful, top notch, well executed experience that many people who got to do it lived it and are sad they can't do it again and still be a mistake and a failure - they aren't mutually exclusive

And you just made his point.

Sucky ideas suck…they don’t need to parsed, caveated, sliced up and respun, etc. etc. etc.

This is what the big D seizes on to avoid making course corrections…”some people liked it”…

So no heads roll and they make more stupid mistakes.

 

[Sirwalterraleigh]

Getting picked up in the news and picking catchy topics does wonders doesn't it?

It’s math. Did you never watched it or not understand it?

It's called '15mins of fame'. You can point to her # of views, yet no one has been able to point to any new message or contribution she's made to the collective about the project.

Does one have to be “credentialed” to go viral now? Did Congress pass new internet laws while I was on vacation?

Let me know when your extended family quotes her before buying their next trip....

..:well it won’t be to starcruiser…we know that already

 

[Disstevefan1]

…but don’t you know it’s DISNEY????

And you just made his point.

Sucky ideas suck…they don’t need to parsed, caveated, sliced up and respun, etc. etc. etc.

This is what the big D seizes on to avoid making course corrections…”some people liked it”…

So no heads roll and they make more stupid mistakes.

Could it be possible it was making money, but not making "enough money" so they shut it down.

Disney's theme park business is much different than their movie business. In their movie business they don't care about making money, but in their theme park business the not only must make money but they must hit numbers, margins in my opinion.

 

[ChrisFL]

Funny how the video is taking on a life of its own. I'm watching a video from Regular Car Reviews which basically mentions how expensive new cars are and you could have bought several tickets to the Galactic Starcruiser and handed the CM money to ensure you don't get sat behind a pillar.

 

[Disstevefan1]

Funny how the video is taking on a life of its own. I'm watching a video from Regular Car Reviews which basically mentions how expensive new cars are and you could have bought several tickets to the Galactic Starcruiser and handed the CM money to ensure you don't get sat behind a pillar.

Since we are already derailed here, I HATE the A-pillar in my Chevy Cruze! Too wide and I have to move my entire body to make a left turn.

Because of A-pillar airbags, A-pillar blind spots is a real thing.

 

[ChrisFL]

I’m indifferent to her… frankly i have zero interest in her opinion because she is just one random person to me. I listen to her experience - but her evaluation is pretty much just one customer’s opinion IMO. What i spoke up about is people putting her video up as some masterpiece of takedowns. It’s not.

As someone who is not a big fans of hers, I do think it is a masterpiece of takedowns, with the realization that Disney did all of the hard work of taking it down themselves, she just decided to report on it and go into details. She had a major handicap in her favor...also that it went so badly the Starcruiser CLOSED.

In other words, it's obvious to a lot of people that Josh D'amaro lazily trying the crappy lightsaber training wasn't convincing anyone, or the big promo where it's just some actor kid who goes to see a lounge singer when he gets lost.

The entrance, being a brutalist looking concrete structure where people have to STAND OUTSIDE? Does that sound like a $6,000+ premium experience?

So not going into every detail, but yeah, her experience happened to be pretty awful as well with Disney not even TRYING to help her out until they found out her twitter reach.

 

[MrPromey]

We only got ~20 surveys for it, so there's a relatively wide margin of error.

Ignoring the survey questions about the (non-existent) pool and park shuttle service, the Galactic Starcruiser was the highest-rated Disney resort in the United States since we started online surveys over a decade ago:

1. Galactic Starcruiser (overall "A" grade at 91.6)
2. Riviera DVC, "A" grade at 90.0
3. Grand Flo Villas DVC, B, 88.4
4. Treehouse Villas DVC, B, 87.6
5. Bay Lake Tower DVC, B, 86.4
   :

The Dolphin is in last place at 80.0, if you consider that a "Disney" resort. Otherwise last place is Pop Century at 80.8.

Some notable Starcruiser numbers:

• Its Recommend to a Friend score was 95 out of 100, the highest we've ever seen
• Its Food rating of 93 is the highest we've ever seen
• It's the only resort ever to maintain a perfect 100 score in Staff Friendliness

I mean, it had issues. But it did a great many things right.

Ah, so for your survey at least, this wasn't being compared with say, FOP or the MK as an attraction or large themed experience but against resorts with typical resort amenities that people stay at while doing the other stuff.

If Disney was making similar comparisons, I could see why that score was so different. This wasn't designed for a general audience and the people attending, at least in concept, are more tuned into what they're doing at this "resort" and why they chose it than your typical person booking a stay at say, the Boardwalk.

 

[MrPromey]

The one smart thing is they under built it with only 100 rooms. I think they really failed at marketing the experience as a premium offering to those who might even consider spending that amount, particularly by not really involving the OT - fans of which are most likely to have that kind of money to burn, given the demo.

As others have said, if Universal offered a 2-night Hogwarts experience for $6K that involved being sorted, a big banquet dinner, simulated quidditch, lessons by Professor Sprout and others, along with and some other cool experiences, it would be sold out for the next two years.

Well, keep in mind too that this experience apparently had a single droid.

Universal's Adventura hotel which is a moderate on that property priced similarly to Disney's value resorts has functional robots that'll bring stuff to your room that could be cleaner distant cousins to an R2 and they're not even scifi themed - just ultra modern.

It's one of the smaller resorts at Universal so I don't know if it was a larger scale compared to Starcruiser that allowed for them to offer something like this or Disney was just being really, really, really cheap but perhaps if they'd gone with more rooms and maybe a different set of experiences at different price points, they could have done more with the actual experience by widening the pool of people they could offer something to and increasing overall revenue than they did for Starcruiser, too beyond just having the majority of it hang on LARPing with improv actors being fed information from what was apparently an automated system of some sort.

 

[flynnibus]

To be fair, I believe her point about the paywall was about the multiple things that had been promised and advertised for SW:GE but never materialized - until they suddenly showed up in the Starcruiser.

Yes, it's certainly fair to note those omissions from SW:GE and they are fair knocks on how good or not SW:GE is.

But know what else? Virtually every project Disney touts in art and presentations has the same issues. The final product being less than the aspirations is as old as time in the Disney theme park universe. Changes like removing dining for instance happen all the time... 'phase 2' is a trigger word for a reason.

Know what else? The reduction of live performers was happening all over the parks - it's not a SW:GE phenom. It was a product pivot we saw happening in all the parks and was part of a much larger nip-n-tuck movement we saw with the company under the leadership at the time.

Know what else? We didn't see all those other acts cut around the parks move to pay-to-play experiences... because they were in fact cuts - not a change in posture to try to make them pay-per-view.

So why should one conclusively decide that SW:GE doesn't have these things because they decided to move them behind a paywall... when we know the concept of this immersive experience pre-dates all of this, we know starcruiser was not a late add-on, we know these kinds of changes were being applied across the entire division, and we know presentations don't always match reality?

This is a classic case of correlation vs causation. But she takes the natural leap as a given, without anything but observations.

Did Starcruiser's development cause changes in SW:GE? Maybe.. can we conclude that with just observations from the outside? No.

Did Starcruiser disappoint in many ways? I think so... but noting those failures doesn't give you powers to make unsupported leaps.

 

[natatomic]

Well, keep in mind too that this experience apparently had a single droid.

Universal's Adventura hotel which is a Moderate on that property priced similarly to Disney's value resorts has functional robots that'll bring stuff to your room that could be cleaner distant cousins to an R2 and they're not even scifi themed - just ultra modern.

It's one of the smaller resorts at Universal so I don't know if it was a larger scale compared to Starcruiser that allowed for them to offer something like this or Disney was just being really, really, really cheap but perhaps if they'd gone with more rooms and maybe a different set of experiences at different price points, they could have done more with the actual experience by widening the pool of people they could offer something to and increasing overall revenue than they did for Starcruiser, too beyond just having the majority of it hang on LARPing with improv actors being fed information from what was apparently an automated system of some sort.

I was at a family-friendly, moderately priced restaurant in North Carolina when visiting family, and the food was delivered to us via robot cats. I think Disney could have stepped up their droid game just a teensy bit.

 

[PREMiERdrum]

Did Starcruiser's development cause changes in SW:GE? Maybe.. can we conclude that with just observations from the outside? No.

Did Starcruiser disappoint in many ways? I think so... but noting those failures doesn't give you powers to make unsupported leaps.

Sure, there wasn't an investigative section where she went undercover to dig up Disney's secret plans to further paywall the SW experience, but...

Speaking as someone with a great financial stake in this business, customer's perception is reality. The onus is on Disney to better understand the impact of their communications and the logical conclusions their customers come to based on the company's actions.

 

[MrPromey]

I don't know -- that HP experience would be pulling from a much, much larger audience than the Starcruiser ever could.

The number of people who would be interested in that kind of Hogwarts experiences is light years beyond the number of people who want something like the Starcruiser, even at that price point.

Assuming the execution was good, of course.

I also think Universal would be able to make what they do work better than current Disney could.

They now seem to have a lot more experience with smaller attractions and a much greater willingness to invest in pop-up things which I think started with continued investment over the years in Halloween Horror Nights which has become a HUGE production to pull off ever year to things like their escape rooms and that thing that's opening up in Las Vegas or even the Tribute stores that are more than just stores but turn over every year or less.

It just feels like they run a more nimble team over there where as for Disney, small scale exclusive offerings typically consist of deserts, exclusive viewing areas for something they're already doing anyway and after-hours access to the attractions they already offer anyway.

I don't think Disney really knew how to do something elaborate and "better" than their scaled up stuff in an affordable and workable way when they went into Starcrusier.

Of all the pictures and video I've now seen of Starcruiser, I've yet to see anything that compares in detail to what you walk past while waiting in standby for Smuggler's Run and at the price they were charging for Starcruiser, that seems a little bit problematic but at the same time, I don't think they know how to do that sort of thing at the pricing they needed to hit for 100 rooms.

I'm sure they could get to that point if they had the will but I think it'll be a future management team that pulls the trigger on making that happen if they ever do since some of the difference between the two is Disney offering exclusive stuff is usually more as a way to make a quick buck with minimal investment and Universal typically taking a different approach.

I know Starcruiser was not Disney trying to make a quick buck but their institutional momentum between that sort of thing when working small-scale and budgets for things like Pandora have I think, left them with a blind spot in between.

 

[PREMiERdrum]

It feels good to be right.

It feel better to be successful.

 

[Horizons '83]

There’s tumbleweed rolling through the magic kingdom
These days…you should swing by…

Also…this:

How a 4-Hour Video About Disney's Failed 'Star Wars' Hotel Took Over the Internet

YouTuber Jenny Nicholson's deep dive into a Disney flop is long, obsessively detailed, and nerdy as hell. It also may be the best thing on the internet.

www.rollingstone.com

Was there in mid-May, this unfortunately was not true for us.

 

[flynnibus]

There was a lot of new information for me personally. I've watched 3 other influencers experience on the Star cruiser, followed these boards since early on, ect.

I learned from her video:

• How the game is supposed to work with trust scores and the AI Chat
• The game experience inside the park
• That for some people the game just flat out does not work
• First time I saw the AI room robot basically fail
• How terrible some of the seats were in the dining room for the show
• How discouraged she was from dressing up and going all in on a character
• How confusing and bad the booking process was

Ok, so you enjoyed her Trip Report But that's not what her video is tilted for or being praised for here... and that was more what my comment was about. I do think her video is bogged down by the intermixing of all the purposes. It would have been much better served to separate the commentary from the personal experience report.

 

[flynnibus]

The outdoor queue into the facility in the WW2 bunker shows how not thought out the nuts and bolts of the hotel experience was. Would have been relatively trivial to build an airport lounge style environment “on land” or alternatively, take your luggage and grant the free admission into DHS that morning and give you a report time to get on the spaceship from GE to GS

I think it's also easy to criticize this with hindsight. It's probably more to do with a division of responsibilities.. like a situation where the people doing the facility probably weren't owners of the transportion element of the experience. The concept works fine when you have a trickle of people.. but bogs down when you have people arriving too early, or arriving in bulk. It is also something they could have refined in time if deemed essential... but history has shown 'show' in arrival/departure areas is usually quickly sacrificed for operational efficiencies. We did see Disney didn't emphasize your 'pre-departure' experience as part of the end to end product... which is again probably the failing of having something like attraction designers doing stuff without hospitality/resort people being key stake holders.

I would say there probably is more a of a pattern of signs of struggling to define what the experience was going to be... is it a 'live in attraction', is it a 'continous show', or is it a 'inclusive resort'. In many ways it's a bit of each, but different disciplines prioritize things differently.. and that can be reflected in what people chose to invest in too.

I think the 'bunker' concept is fine.. but I think it would have been better served by more set design around it to support the notion of a larger facility. IMO