Tomorrow, after only 18 months in operation, the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser at Disney World is shutting down.
As you may know, I had the privilege of being able to go on the Starcruiser during it’s first month being open. We happened to live in Central Florida at the time, and my wife and I hadn’t been on a vacation for a few years due to the pandemic, so something that would normally be out of our price range was affordable. Yes, it was expensive, but I cannot express to you just how much value you got out of the experience.
Why Did It Fail?
Many people saw the commercial for the Starcruiser, saw the pricetag, and decided there was no way something like that could succeed. To be fair, the commercial was absolute garbage. Instead of actually walking you through what a trip would be like, there were a lot of hype words, and a music video for one of the original songs by the on-board character Gaya.
When this commercial came out, I had already purchased my tickets, and I feared that I had just wasted thousands of dollars. What exactly was going on?
I walked through my actual experience here, but the synopsis included:
- First Order story path – Finding if there is Resistance presence on the ship
- Resistance story path – Hiding evidence from the First Order
- Jedi/Saja storypath – Helping Rey get on board
- Heist storypath – Recover a lost/stolen gem from onboard the ship
- Smuggler storypath – This was fairly intertwined with the Heist in my experience
- Rom-Com storypath – two characters fell in love, you could help them
All of this took place over three acts, which took place over:
- The first night, meeting the characters, and being asked for help to complete missions on Batuu.
- Your day at Galaxy’s Edge in Hollywood Studios, completing missions, specifically from the two rides Rise of the Resistance and Smugglers Run.
- The night after Galaxy’s Edge, the big finale.
There were so many activities happening, that even if you knew ahead of time every single story beat, it would take you three trips to see it all.
The problem?
You’d have no way of knowing that beforehand, unless you heard it from someone that already went. It was not clear the level of detail and self-driven story that would be involved.
When I kept hearing questions like “why would I go there instead of the other Disney hotels?” I knew that no one understood what was happening. It wasn’t a hotel, and to let people call it the “Star Wars Hotel” was a major failing. It was more like a LARP camp, with a field trip to Galaxy’s Edge. Everything you saw was manufactured to tell this overarching, interweaving set of stories, and it was perfectly done. You lived, for two days, inside of a magic trick. A Star Wars magic trick, where you are the one that vanishes on stage, and you don’t even know how they did it.
The people that say “it doesn’t feel like Star Wars” probably didn’t even go. Sure, it doesn’t look like Star Wars, because 2/3s of Star Wars is about an underfunded military. This was from the 1/3 of Star Wars that is about the wealthy day-to-day of the inner rim. Coruscant, Canto Bight, Qi’Ra and Dryden Vos. Could it have gone with the underfunded military part? Probably, but then it wouldn’t be as attractive to families.
What Have We Learned?
There is a push right now for the next level of entertainment happening. The tourism industry is trying really hard to get away from cheap hotels and cookie cutter vacations. It wants to find bigger vacations that you take less often, but you think about for longer. I saw this with the attempted Evermore Park in Utah as well. An umbrella of activities that you don’t sleep or drink your way through, but also isn’t just for able-bodied adrenaline junkies.
Evermore didn’t succeed because it was run by a Silicon Valley tech-bro who assumed he was a genius, because he made a company worth $8 billion. He knew nothing about running a theme park, aside from what he learned having big Halloween parties. Like all tech-bros, he thought he could solve every problem by just throwing money at it, and eventually the money ran out. Evermore is still open, but it is a fraction of what it was when I went on opening day, which was a fraction of what they were promoting.
Disney knows how to foster creativity, and they created a successful vision. Their failure, was in not realizing how unique their product was, and how small of an audience they would have for it. The Venn Diagram of people that a) want an exclusively Star Wars vacation, b) want to Live Action Roleplay for two days, and c) have $6,000 for a two day vacation, is incredibly small.
Besides putting a better marketing team on this, there are two steps that I believe could have solved this problem.
- Reduce the trip frequency to once per week. Having 2-3 voyages every week runs you through that small audience incredibly quickly. Only operate the ship in the middle of the week. Board on Tuesday, Galaxy’s Edge on Wednesday, Disembark on Thursday. This allows you to have a single full-sized cast and crew, as opposed to 2-3. The parks are also less busy, letting the premium guests have shorter wait times in Galaxy’s Edge.
- Reduce the minimum product. If you want to try it out, perhaps have the ability to walk around the ship when it’s not operating. Maybe you open the restaurant for a lunch service on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and you are allowed to explore the ship before/after lunch. Now you can still have some cast/crew, but it is much shorter, and more focused.
I truly believe we will see something like this again, and very soon. Perhaps Universal will open a Night at Hogwarts event as an extension of the Harry Potter World area. You arrive on the Diagon Alley side, pick up vouchers for a wand, and a discount for other gear. Take the train to Hogsmeade, and kids can be sorted into their houses, eat dinner at the Great Hall, learn spells with their new interactive wands, and sleep in a House common room. The next day you wake up, take the train back to Diagon Alley, the end. Make it so it doesn’t take over your vacation, it is merely a highlight of it. Now it’s much cheaper, you are doing the same activities as the movie characters, and it’s easier to sell.
I loved my time on the Galactic Starcruiser, and I will continue to search for these types of trips and experiences, because I know that we haven’t yet found the version that will be successful.
The Nerdd 