Attack of the 20 Billion Dollar Expansion

Foxxfur from the really terrific blog Passport to Dreams Old and New contributes a special commentary today. She takes a look at Disney World’s recent and upcoming plans for resort hotel expansion and provides a perspective both insightful and just a little bit provocative at times; hopefully a refreshing change of pace from my usually Pollyana-based views on the World. Enjoy!

Attack of the 20 Billion Dollar Expansion

One of the varied blessings Walt Disney World allows for is the blessing of the resorts. After years of having been variously elated and rather beaten-about by the Walt Disney World theme parks, storming in at 9:00 and out twelve hours later, after endless treks back and forth in the rain from the Train Station lockers to the Haunted Mansion, and after getting sick twice on Casey’s hot dogs, I discovered the wonder of the resorts.

The resorts are a blessing, especially for the Walt Disney World frequent abuser who has apparently seen and done it all, and I hold to the belief that Walt Disney World would be a less stressful, more sane place if more guests would bother to leave the park, go to a resort, and spend several hours doing nothing, or drinking heavily, or whatever it is they need to do before returning for more abuse. It’s been repeated ad infinitum from 1989 on, but this is genuinely good advice.

What is even better about the resorts is how they’ve become clustered: some of my nicest days on property haven’t been in parks as of late, but spending time in the resort areas. Magic Kingdom resorts are accessible by about a hundred different ways to Sunday, and with the sheer volume of recreation, shopping and dining that these singular mega-getaways offer it’s easy and reasonably cheap to forgo that extra day at MGM and just go to the Magic Kingdom or EPCOT resort areas for the day. Although Disney says we’re not supposed to, pool hopping is always fun (just don’t get caught at the Yacht & Beach Club one), you can rent a surrey bike at Boardwalk or boat to Downtown Disney from Dixie Landings, and generally actually enjoy living.

But in the last ten years I’ve also began to become really miffed. As nice as these places are in expanding your vacation and as convenient they are, clustered as they are, I’ve begin to become increasingly uneasy about the Walt Disney World machine. Finally, when will enough finally be enough? I can go to Disney’s official website, wait for the interminable interface to load, and count from one to twenty-one without landing on something you’re not supposed to stay in for seven to ten days. I can add five or eight to that figure if I count the Disney Vacation Club adjuncts as separate resorts, like Disney does. And now with four cheap-o resorts on property, and that’s without counting the “not really Disney” Hotel Plaza Boulevard madness, we’re supposed to swallow that they’re planning on opening even more, even cheaper hotels on property, as well as a Four Seasons on top of one of the Golf Courses, as well as whole new sections of Animal Kingdom Lodge and Contemporary… and one begins to wonder if the person pulling the strings here has ever heard of the concept of supply exceeding demand.

I can go to Coronado Springs and not see a single normal guest in sight. This may be because the resort is so effing huge that your vision gives out before the acreage does, but it probably mostly has something to do with the fact that the resort only seems to exist for an endless parade of conventioneers. The resort is so strange and dead that Disney’s doesn’t even run the food court and there is no upscale dining option. Was all this money spent really necessary, in the long run? The resort is huge but it feels like a ghost town. Where is the demand?

Last time I stayed at Old Key West, I stayed in a room which hadn’t been opened in months. There were actually cobwebs the cleaning staff hadn’t gotten yet, and the whole place had a dead atmosphere like it had been forgotten and boarded up. We were nowhere near anything convenient and it was unlike any Disney Resort experience I’ve ever had. You can’t tell me Disney is filling up those rooms. And yet we’re building an adjunct to Animal Kingdom Lodge that’s bigger than the original resort and another 16 floor tower next to the Contemporary while you can’t swing a killer whale in Coronado Springs and knock down a vacationing family and Old Key West rooms are becoming nothing but containers for spiders and ghosts.

And yet, terrifyingly, park attendance numbers continue to climb and soon you won’t even be able to go into Magic Kingdom on any day of the week without being slaughtered alive by ravenous Disney Dining Plan equipped theme park commandos because you’re standing between them and the Fast Pass machine. Considering that on many days EPCOT and Animal Kingdom can’t reach the numbers they’re capable of, Disney doesn’t care: they’ll push people through those Magic Kingdom turnstiles until nobody can move on Main Street and if anybody strikes a match everybody’ll burn alive because it doesn’t matter what the Guest Experience is like now that they’ve already got your money.

Disney ought to be reducing their attendance cap at Magic Kingdom and MGM and start outlawing traditional strollers in the park and helping guests enjoy themselves and stop shoveling more price effective and price gouging “punishment packages” at guests hoping they won’t notice they’re being conned. But they won’t. They’ll build more resorts and try to drag in more people and offer nothing in the way of a pressure relief valve until it’s too late.

And meanwhile the parks deteriorate because management is terrified that these people will stage a revolt if something is closed (if you doubt this one, you should’ve seen Orlando Pirates between April and July last year) because they’ve been planning this trip for years and Disney can’t get its’ act together to actually work on the time table they’re encouraging guests to have to plan on. It’s disgusting that you have to make dining reservations months in advance, but that’s the way Disney wants it. They’ve dug themselves into a hole they can’t even function inside of.

Why isn’t the resort hemorrhaging money on these hotel rooms? We know they can’t fill them but they irrationally continue to build more. Are buildings being closed in Phases? When the iron gets too cold will they pull the same joke they produced post 9/11 and actually close whole resorts for “refurbishment”? Why are they building more resorts when they refuse to finish a building they half constructed over at Pop Century?

Walt Disney World opened with one theme park, two resorts, a Country Club hotel, and a campground. Eventually they added another Country Club, a shopping plaza, some cheap-o hotels and, finally, another park. Walt Disney World grew into its’ skin. Euro Disneyland opened with six hotels and you couldn’t get the money flow out of that place to go the other way with a shovel for a few months because of it. And I’m just wondering when that bright shiny Walt Disney World bubble is going to pop, because it’s gonna happen, and at the rate we’re going – sooner, not later.