Disney’s Star Wars hotel was torpedoed by a truly terrible app
Earlier in May, filmmaker and critic Jenny Nicholson released the four-hour YouTube documentary The spectacular failure of the Star Wars Hotel. The video has since been viewed nearly six million times and spawned dozens of follow-up ideas, ranging from fervent hand-wringing over the diminished nature of the modern theme park experience to critics arguing against the continued commercial viability of the Star Wars brand itself. , to genuine surprise consumer demand for long-form video content on YouTube. Personally, I don’t have much to add to the discourse other than this: Nicholson is right about the app. There was no hope for the hotel with that app.
I was there, Gandalf, during an abbreviated Galactic Starcruiser tour hosted by Disney Parks in February 2022. As I made clear in my review of the Star Wars hotel, Polygon was invited to the four-hour event on Disney’s dime. In Nicholson’s video you can even see footage from the same tour I was on for around the two hour mark.
At no point during that conversation were the many influencers or the handful of press present aboard the Galactic Starcruiser, known as the Halcyon, given access to the Datapad app. Instead, the trip was verbally annotated by Disney’s guides as if we had been using the app all along. Cast members sent us to certain in-fiction events and appearances as if we had been welcomed into those spaces by the app. But Nicholson’s research, based on her own firsthand account of the full experience as well as anecdotal reports posted on social media by dozens of other guests, paints a damning picture of a piece of software that simply didn’t work as intended.
The Galactic Starcruiser Datapad, itself built into the larger My Disney Experience app, was to be the conduit that connected guests to the storyline of their choice during their stay at the Star Wars hotel. In practice, however, it appears that the app only worked part of the time. As a result, a significant portion of the guests who attended the approximately $5,000 (minimum) two-day experience found themselves adrift, disconnected from the resources available to the on-site staff to properly engage them in the goings-on. sailing aboard the boat. spaceship. The only solution for some guests was to step outside the fiction, pick up the phone or stand in line with a customer service representative at the hotel, and complain the old fashioned way.
What killed Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser? I don’t think it was the presence of Rey and Kylo Ren or any of the other trappings of the modern trilogy. And I don’t think it was a lack of fun things to do at the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge theme park either, although that probably didn’t help much. What ultimately torpedoed the Star Wars hotel was poor app design, a buggy piece of software that was never quite up to the task.
Unfortunately, the Star Wars hotel no longer exists. Last September, the Halcyon took guests on a final journey. It’s a shame, because some of the performances – especially those involving Rey and her allies in the Resistance – were extraordinary. Clearly, there’s only so much heavy lifting a dedicated team of actors can do if the digital director driving the action fails as spectacularly as the Datapad app did here.