In early May, filmmaker and critic Jenny Nicholson released the four-hour YouTube documentary The spectacular failure of the Star Wars HotelThe video has since been viewed nearly 6 million times and has spawned dozens of follow-up posts ranging from passionate hand-wringing over the diminished quality of the modern theme park experience, to critics arguing against the continued commercial viability of the Star Wars brand itself, to genuine surprise at Consumer appetite for long-form video content on YouTube. Personally, I don’t have much to add to the discussion except this: Nicholson is right about the app. With that app, there was no hope for the hotel.
I was there, Gandalf, during an abbreviated tour of Galactic Starcruiser hosted by Disney Parks in February 2022. As I made clear in my Star Wars Hotel review, Polygon was invited to the four-hour event at Disney’s expense. In fact, in Nicholson’s video, you can see footage of the exact same tour, which I took about two hours into.
At no point during the entire junket were the many influencers or the handful of press aboard the Galactic Starcruiser, known as Halcyon, given access to the Datapad app. Instead, the junket was verbally narrated by Disney’s tour guides as if we had been using the app the entire time. Cast members guided us to specific fictional events and performances as if we had been invited into those spaces by the app. But Nicholson’s investigation, based on her own firsthand account of the entire experience as well as anecdotal accounts posted on social media by dozens of other guests, paints a damning picture of software that simply didn’t work as intended.
The Galactic Starcruiser datapad, itself integrated into the more extensive My Disney Experience app, was designed to connect guests to the storyline of their choice during their stay at the Star Wars hotel. In practice, however, the app only worked intermittently. As a result, a significant portion of guests who took part in the roughly $5,000 (at least) two-day experience were left in the lurch, with no way to properly engage on-site staff with what was happening aboard the starship. The only solution for some guests was to opt out of the fiction, pick up the phone, or queue up with a customer service representative at the hotel and complain the old-fashioned way.
What broke Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser’s neck? I don’t think it was the presence of Rey and Kylo Ren or any of the other features of the modern trilogy. And I don’t think it was the lack of exciting activities 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, buggy software that was never quite up to the task.
Sadly, the Star Wars hotel is no more. The Halcyon took its guests on one final voyage in September last year. That’s a shame, because some of the performances – particularly those featuring Rey and her allies in the Resistance – were exceptional. A dedicated team of actors obviously can’t do as much heavy lifting anymore when the digital director controlling the action fails as spectacularly as the datapad app does here.
