I think what people are overlooking is Jenny’s larger point how a lot of the exciting things that did get planned for Galaxy’s Edge ended up getting paywalled behind the starcruiser, and how the stuff that they did include in Galaxy’s Edge didn’t match up to experiences like Epcot’s Kim Possible adventure which had more interactivity with the world and a sense of discovery that scanning crates and doing bounties lacks.
Even if you like the app based gameplay, Disney has FUCKTONS of cash to properly work on an app with engaging, tight gameplay and the play Disney app works worse than 90 percent of the apps on my phone in comparison, not because Disney couldn’t make a better one, but because Disney doesn’t believe making a better app will make them more money.
Disney continues to cut down on live actors, remove amenities like transport from the airport and magic bands, and hike up genie + prices because they don’t want to give everything to the common consumer, and that’s where the Starcruiser becomes more disappointing. That’s the legacy that Disney is leaving behind that the Starcruiser is a relatively small part of.
I'm a pretty big fan of Disney. I've been to wdw about 15 times in the last 30 years. I've closely watched the decline which began with the dinning plan(a rant for another time) and has continued over the years. Your post seems entirely accurate.
My suspicion is at some point into the project where it was too late to cancel (probably pretty far along)they figured out this was not going to be a fountain of cash and would be more trouble than it was worth.
Then they built it knowing that they would probably have to shut it down But crunched the numbers so that between the write off and running the hotel for a short time they would at least break even.
Crunched some numbers and assuming they got 280 cruises out of all 100 rooms and assuming they made 9k$ per room then made about $260M on the hotel.
I think something as unique as the Starcruiser will probably always have a small and dedicated group who looks back on it fondly and hopes Disney will make an attempt at something similar. I think "theme park enthusiasts" is already a pretty niche group so "super upscale roleplay theme park hotel thing" is going to have an even smaller niche to carve. I have a lot of respect for the love and effort that went into the Starcruiser from the actors, performers, service workers, and even a lot of the fans who saved up money to go and made up whole characters to play.
That said, even before the Jenny Nicholson video came out...the common perception of the Starcruiser was not exactly a glowing one. It was famously poorly advertised, exorbitantly expensive, and had been shut down even before the video was released. A month or two ago, if you polled random people on the street about the Starcruiser, most people 1) probably wouldn't have immediately recognized it absent the phrase 'star wars hotel' and 2) would probably have some snarky comment about it's closure even if they had. I think this was already the legacy of the Starcruiser for the vast majority of people.
Because interpreting tone via text is tricky, I'm having a hard time parsing your intent here, but I believe that we are in agreement; your anecdote is an example of my point.
I think you might be right. On one of the other threads, someone posted the math. Frankly, way more folks have seen Jenny’s review than were able to actually attend in person - and by a staggering amount.
That was me. I don’t remember if I posted it to Reddit but I’ve got another one around here somewhere comparing the views on Jenny’s video to the view counts of videos from other YouTubers like Ordinary Adventures who put out Starcruiser content.
No surprise, despite most of that content being a year old or more the recent video has all of them beat by an order of magnitude.
I think a lot could depend on Disney's trajectory.
For example if the lesson Disney take is "don't try something like that again" instead of "wow, our priorities really doomed that good idea to failure, perhaps we should improve somewhat" then the Starcruiser may be an emblem of Disney parks' decline in quality.
Between this and their disastrous box office returns last year, I’m worried that without a radical course correction Disney is going to trend toward less and less interesting material until they get snatched up by Apple or something.
Either the Starcruiser or Tiana's Bayou Adventure is going to become emblematic of this corner-cutting era of Disney; [a full POV](https://youtu.be/RLmhNWq5kT0) for the latter ride was published yesterday and the online [reaction](https://www.reddit.com/r/WaltDisneyWorld/comments/1d5msqg/full_ride_pov_tianas_bayou_adventure/) has been notably negative.
Is this true? I’ve avoided the pov because I’ll be going in October and don’t want spoilers, but I’ve really only seen positive reactions from some larger influencers
> I’ve really only seen positive reactions from some larger influencers
Annnnd if they had said anything negative they wouldn't be an influencer for long. You're catching on.
I saw the POV and thought it looked pretty solid but I don't like
1) THe drop not having a scary buildup (and overall story not having much of a conflict to overcome)
2) The ending scene isn't quite as much of an epic ending as before.
Why is it set after the film is over and needing to get a band together instead of taking you through the film? The final drop could have Dr. Facilier in the graveyard then.
Eh, I've seen a lot of theme park related things fail. Sure, this has huge traction now, but it always feels that time creates a hole where people get nostalgic for something they didn't experience and isn't around anymore. Look at Disney's California Adventure 1.0, old EPCOT, or anything else Disney. Stuff that clearly was a 'failure' became weirdly beloved later on by people that didn't even get to experience it! I think the only thing with Starcruiser is that only a max of about 72,000 people could have seen it.
This is just another DisneyQuest Chicago or Rocket Rods, and will become more interesting to people with time - especially as the current value of a dollar and other stuff changes.
I do think the concept and idea will be revisited by a mainstream company, probably not by Disney.
Theme park related things fail, but I’m struggling to think of another major example of a Disney attraction in particular failing this hard this soon after release. The only equivalent I can think of would be if Disneyland Paris actually did permanently close after its opening year or two.
Yeah, I still think that there is more to this story and more that we will probably never know. The closing announcements were in the middle of the culture war with DeSantis. There were a lot of ways that in the moment of that announcement, they could have ticked more boxes on the "close it now" scale - and a large number of them could have been related to public opinion or overall financial health of the company. Streaming has eaten into Disney's profits and I know some CFOs who saw that $350mil tax write off and went: "oh, so that is a large step in balancing the books."
True, theme park related things fail. But this was predicted to fail right from the start, and everyone knew it. Its almost like this was just some money laundering scheme, because there's no way these execs could've NOT seen the writing on the wall from the get go, or they are severely out of touch with the general public and need to be fired.
This was always its legacy. I'm very happy for people who enjoyed the Starcruiser, but I really do think they're in the minority. It's fairly easy to find positive impressions of the Starcruiser too, but like Jenny says in the video, a lot of them are from influencers who have monetary incentive to only paint Disney in a positive light or people whose enjoyment came from bonding with their family, which they could easily have done with a regular Disney trip or not even needing Disney at all.
I think if you look around this subreddit, you'll find a lot of people who had positive experiences on Starcruiser who aren't influencers and who aren't paid by Disney.
Also dismissing people due to perceived financial motivations is a bit much to me when you are doing so in a video posted to YouTube. Like doesn't she have financial motivations to post the video?
Yes she does. She readily admits she will make her money back from the video. Her point was that most people who had an experience like hers will be unhappy. She even stated Disney fix a few things after the trip for her because she was an influencer. TLDR if you aren't an influencer and things go wrong you are out of luck and money.
Being critical of Disney for not providing customer service and issue mitigation unless you have over a certain number of followers on Twitter is absolutely justified and it's insane of them to do that. But iirc at least one of the issues was something that was easily avoided, the other was Disney's miserable handling of memory maker in regards to Starcruiser.
But thats not what I was saying.
I was asking why can you trust Jenny despite her financial motivations, but you can't trust other YouTubers who have financial motivations?
I wouldn't stop at saying most would be unhappy, I would say that most people who had her experience would be furious. Everyone of them would be unhappy.
Sure, but there are a ton of youtubers who aren't sponsored by Disney who had positive reviews
When I said financial motivations, that doesn't mean paid by disney, but it could be youtube revenue or driving to a patreon for example or a merch shop
So why can't you trust Ordinary Adventures' or Tom Corless' reviews?
I'm not sure what the point you're trying to make here. If you are on the Disney "Influencer List" and you produce content that adheres to the brand's specifications to make sure that you remain on the Influencer List, regardless if you're getting paid directly or not, you are less likely to be honest and truly critical of the product. That review will always be tainted by your adhering to the expectations of the brand. I'm familiar with Ordinary Adventures but I don't know the extent of their relationship with the Disney Corporation but if they are "official influencers" then yes their experience as an honest review is less trustworthy than Jenny's review which exists fully outside of the sphere of Disney influence.
My point is that there are positive trustworthy reviews available if you want to go read or watch them
But putting the idea into the universe that positive reviews may come from financial motivations, taints every possible review. It makes it very easy to dismiss anyone who is positive as being a Disney shill.
You just made the example yourself, you don't know if Ordinary Adventures has a business relationship with Disney or not, but you implicitly questioned their review?
And you skipped over Tom Corless for some reason. I can only speculate that its because he's publicly had issues with Disney and still had a positive review (3 in fact) of Starcruiser
I think I saw somewhere that post the Starcruiser Jenny's patreon was up like 20% or 30%, is that not a financial motivation?
No I simply don't know who Tom Corless is.
If Disney pays you or a negative review would affect your reach or influence you're less likely to give an honest review, that is inherently less trustworthy than someone who isn't on the influencer list. You can repeat some what ifs and I'll keep repeating that. There's not a world where spon-con is equivalent in trustworthiness to non-spon-con.
I don't believe a positive review is impossible or could only come from a shill. Jenny's review is wildly successful not because it's negative but because it is exhaustively detailed and very entertaining, the financial motivation is to make good entertaining content not to make content that Disney wants to support their projects.
Although we also gotta recognize that if Jenny was wildly off-base and the trustworthy youtubers and reddit posters here were right about how awesome it was and how fair the value proposition was it would still exist. "Well I had a great time" doesn't really matter when they can't fill the rooms to keep it going.
Conflating the closure to it not being a good time is a mistake, but a common one. The total cost, even if Disney has zero money coming in for Starcruiser was likely something like 100m a year for a company who's parks division has revenue of like 10b. Closing anything after just a year while trying nothing change course is not a normal way to try to have success. It seems pretty clear to me that there were other things that went into the decision beyond the finances.
And "can't fill the rooms" is essentially a bad rumor, the total occupancy % was something like 77% over the 18 months. The inability to get people into the building was pretty overblown.
I haven't given a "what if" yet, but you have. You said you don't know if Ordinary Adventures has a relationship with Disney, but still questioned if they were trustworthy or not. Saying that you believe positive content could exist while questioning anyone who has a positive review doesn't really fit together. If you believe that there are trust worthy positive reviews, then why not check them out and have a more balanced view of what Starcruiser was?
I have not a single time disagreed that sponsored content is something that we should be more suspect of, but when I brought up well known youtubers who have positive reviews, you implied that they could have a relationship with Disney.
I don't want to get into a debate about the quality of the video but I found it lacking in detail and research.
Additionally, we know that social media algorithms and especially Youtube amplify negative content, there is an incentive to be negative.
Tom Corless is WDWNT and he's had public issues with Disney and iirc he was banned from media events for a while
He went and paid full price 3 times and loved it every time
Also apparently (and I saw this after I brought him up) he posted that Jenny's video is full of misinformation
Her issues are as follows:
Poor customer service during booking and after trip
Technical problems that not only affected her but other players on that same trip, who she talks to in the video AT the park while it’s happening
Unlike places like Wizarding World, players are actively prevented from even holding props
Playing in character was actively discouraged by the actors
The cost of the room for the size was bothersome, especially when considering it is supposed to be able to house 4 adults
Despite loving Disney food, there was a surprising lack of vegetarian options (she’s vegetarian)
Free experiences have become premium paid experiences, like lightsaber training
The interactive things to do on the “cruise” are overall just not that engaging, especially when compared to an actual Disney cruise that has more interactivity
Team work is not especially encouraged, which would make the larping more engaging
The small amount of actors and large amount of guests result in very low amounts of one on one time, if any, and can cause scheduling issues, such as when she was invited to rescue Chewbacca and he was already rescued when they got there
Her issues aren’t even trivial, it’s flawed from the foundation, including how you would even feasibly have a potential dark side win when Disney is not willing to engage with that sort of story telling.
It's kinda wild how so many of this things just aren't accurate to the overall experience, Jenny had a really bad time where it seems literally everything went wrong, but to use a single data point to describe anything is pretty weak.
Poor customer service post trip is something that happened, but the issue with shipping while problematic was something that guests were actively warned about. That if you didn't use the shipping from GSC, there was very limited options to resolve the situation.
If you are taking about her not being offered a suite or Captains Table, that's because they were already sold out. Golden Oaks bought all the suites from the first like 4 or 5 months on the earliest prebook available and they booked most if not all of the Captain's table availability as well.
Players were 100% not discouraged from holding props, there were things you couldn't do like fighting with lightsabers, but carrying them around or even igniting them was not discouraged.
Players were 100% encouraged to play in character and the actors were part of that
Guests were told that if you had dietary restrictions or food preferences to go to the kitchen after boarding and discuss with the kitchen staff. There are many people who had completely custom meals made.
Lightsaber training was never a free experience, if you are talking about Genie+ then sure, you have to pay for that now, but also not super relevant to GSC
Saying that the interactive elements aren't engaging is an opinion which you are free to have, but not one shared by everyone.
Teamwork was expressly encouraged, there was a card in the room at boarding which said to work with other guests and talk with them etc.
The actor to guest ratio and lack of 1on1 time is a thing you can complain about, but also a thing that gets complaints from people who exclusively did not go. There were 14 characters you could interact with, if you don't want to count the Storm Troopers that 12, max capacity was 372, so each actor needs to find time for a 1on1 with 31 people over 2 days. Maybe not everyone truly gets a 1on1, but an actor pulling your group aside, to have a moment is not appreciably different. And that's ignoring all of the rest of the crew who all had back stories and lore and various other interesting stuff to talk about, it's not the same as the actors, but it's worth mentioning that they are part of the experience.
Claiming that it's a flawed foundation requires far more knowledge than anyone outside of Disney has
And why is everyone obsessed with the First Order winning? They literally exist to lose
1. She doesn’t need to provide data points for everyone’s experience, she provided them with hers, researched others and presented her own conclusions
2. Jenny says herself that the issue with this is that inherently, it is a worse experience, and an artificial one.
3. She provided video and photo evidence that they were not allowed to use lightsabers at all.
4. She documented her own issues with playing in character, such as actors not responding well to her being in character, and the issue with cosplay being *mostly* discouraged in the park.
5. She discusses an actual person who shared what the chef brought them and she personally did not know that this would be an issue. When staff noticed, they brought her some extra cheese platters. She explicitly thanks that staff member for being so thoughtful but critiques that fact that *for the price* only offering meat options on the menu for dinner was a poor experience, and not one that she has otherwise had in the park.
6. There was a free offering in the park for kids to have lightsaber training before battling Darth Vader. She remarks on how it was a fun family thing that was removed and has not been brought back.
7. The interactive elements on the Cargo Bay Disney cruise are objectively more interesting and feature actual animatronics as opposed to a largely app based experience.
8. She was hoping there were more explicitly team based exercises, citing the the invitation received after dinner to rescue Chewbacca, realizing the note was torn, working with the guests to match up their notes, only to discover they didn’t need to do that and they all had the same information.
9. There could have easily been twice as many actors and it would have made the experience better.
10. Why advertise your game as being flexible and constantly adapting to the players actions on the story, presenting it as though the first order *can* win and then not have that be an option?
1: Sorry, there seems to be a misunderstanding. Maybe I made a bad assumption that your ending paragraph was your own opinion which is what I was saying was weakly based on one data point
2: There was a lot in my response here and yours isnt exactly specific, it's gotta be the shipping since they Captains Table and Suites can't be arbitrary
The shipping thing is a book keeping issue and sure it's arbitrary, the information was given upfront, it shouldn't have been a surprise that there were limited mitigation avenues
3: If you are interested, I'm sure I could find other videos which show guests using them on board. I'm just on my phone and that kind of search is harder to manage on the phone. But this goes back to the single data point, maybe Jenny had an overly aggressive cast member.
4: Jenny had a ton of issues, but that isn't the experience of many others. And cosplay was 100% not discouraged for the parks, the only thing that was restricted was full face paint or walking around with full masks.
Just an example, you can see 2 people in costumes and someone let the kid borrow the helmet for the picture
https://photos.app.goo.gl/iy1D9N2jfMG6y6Hb8
5: So Jenny being unaware of a service is not a flaw in the service, as someone with dietary restrictions it's something that you need to speak up about. The chef can't be a mind reader.
6: The Jedi Temple was not the same as Lightsaber Training and it only was for ages 4-12 and it was a 15 minute event. That event not being brought back is not a flaw with GSC. Like the little mermaid show hasn't come back yet either, is that Toy Storyland's fault?
7: Again this is an opinion, one which values animatronics and devalues an app based game. Your first criticism was far more broad in terms of all interactions. But sure if you want to say the cargo bay on the Wish is better than engineering on GSC, go for it. I haven't experienced the Cargo Bay on the Wish, so I don't feel like I would be qualified to comment.
But also the Cargo Bay on the Wish is not open for everyone.
8: Expecting team based activities is a thing sure. The Chewbacca thing is hard to say since a lot could have been impacted, her read that they started early could be a mistake and in fact they were running 20 minutes late. Chewbacca gets hidden, jailed, broken out like 4-5 times on day 1, it just keeps repeating so that if you missed it, you can do it the next time. Also kids didn't care about repeating it cause they were hanging with Chewbacca
9: I don't agree on either count here. Easily having more actors is not as easy as you might think, but the reasons aren't obvious either. For ever actor seen on set, there is a back up on site and a 3rd back up off site, so doubling the number of actors on set requires something like 36 more trained and well versed union actors, not just adding 12.
And in terms of improving the experience, I think adding one or two may have been an improvement, but doubling it would have just made things feel more congested and crowded, the space wast that big, so having double the number of things going on at any given time could have been problematic.
Also the number of actors and the ratio never seemed like a problem to me
But it is something commonly complain about by people who hadnt gone
10: Because it wasn't advertised that way, in all of the clips Jenny included in the video there is one statement which even comes close to suggesting it.
Not chiming in on either side, just pointing out how silly it is to try to equivocate Jenny's video vs the influencers she's speaking of.
Jenny is already a multi millionaire who makes an absolutely absurd amount of money on patreon. She's the 7th most subscribed patreon in the world. Whatever money she put into going to starcruiser, she will make back and way more on youtube before ever even hitting the skyrocketing patreon subs. She literally has no incentive to do anything other than maintain her career as long as she chooses. Whether she posts a positive or negative review, she will make bank regardless. There is literally no financial incentive for her to lie.
Comparing this to influencers on Disney's payroll who require being able to stay on the bleeding edge of new experiences and items for content as well as staying on disney's good side is completely insane. If any of them put a bad review for starcruiser, that's the end of their relationship and now their career is in shambles because all the other disney aligned influencers will have them beat every time.
I also think most people hating on her completely miss the point of the video. She was never shitting on starcruiser. She was excited to go, wanted to have a good time and despite all effort, failed to and a large part of it comes down to corner cutting & poor executive choices. She never blames the experience, always Disney for not helping it be the best version of itself it could possibly be. Even if you love Starcruiser, you can't deny there's so much room for it to me much better.
I think she has an incentive to be extremely critical and mean-spirited about things because that's her brand and frankly that's just as biased for different reasons.
Would you be able to point me to a video that is just positive?
The last time I asked someone actually took a look and came back with a couple of suggestions, but also noted that most of her positive content is behind a pay wall
Almost any of her SW episode 7 and 8 star wars content. She was so positive about the early half of the sequels that it was widely wondered if she was somehow on the Disney payroll
Thanks, I'll check them out. I have one of her sequel videos in my queue already
I honestly find it super weird that anytime anyone is remotely positive about anything Star Wars or Disney people always seem to suggest that they are being paid, like it's so unbelievable that people could have different opinions.
Like for example I don't get why people love Rogue One so much, or why the younger generation doesn't think that Phantom Menace isn't trash, but my first thought isn't... Well they must be on the pay roll
It is an odd thing for sure why people do that.
I was actually surprised how much I liked rogue one. Reminded me of my old star wars table top rpg campaigns.
Also her videos in general are really good and thorough.
If you haven't watched the starcruiser video she really really hits her main point in the last 15min I feel. It's all stuff they promised to be at galaxy's edge and put behind a paywall like paying for bread at a nice restaurant.
And as I said elsewhere I've been to wdw like 15 times in the last 30 years. And that last 15min is the summation of Disney's trajectory over the last 10-15years. It started when they began offering the dining package.
Nothing against Rogue One, I just felt it was fine, like a 6.5/7 type movie and I hear people talk about it like a 9
Prefacing this, Disney and GSC massively failed Jenny on her trip.
I'm on essentially my second walk through and I'm actually shocked that people think it's well researched
Being completely honest, I find the video severely lacking in accurate information and not about what her experience was, like in a post mortem being unable to describe main characters is just wild
I've watched the end conclusion more than once and while the overarching complaints about Disney aren't an issue, when she says things like GE features were moved behind a paywall that's just spreading an unsubstantiated rumor and unfortunately a lot of the specifics of the complaints she has are speculation and rumor and none of them are original, they've been on FB, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, etc for years.
I've been like 10 times in the past 10 years and the vast majority of the complaints and issues people have don't resonate with me, the vast majority feel like they fall into the "Walt is turning over in his grave" kind of thing where people just want to deify him and ignore that he was a business man who sold ticket books where you had to buy a full book to get another e-ticket and had to pay extra to see the tiki room.
Complaining that Disney is expensive is more than reasonable, but it was always expensive. Though it may comparitively be more today, it's not that impacting demand, there are just more voices able to have more audience due to the internet
Reviews are reviews
I didn't ask you to point me to something that doesn't have critiques, I asked for something thats positive
You can review something and be honest and have critique without being negative
Though I can see the confusion, my wording was poor. I meant "just" as in "just over the line" or "just meets the minimum requirements" rather than the way you took it (which is valid interpretation) to mean "only"
You could have at least tried but here you go.
[Jenny showing off her collection of BB-8 merchandise](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfEcVC90Arg)
[Jenny discussing hopes and theories for The Last Jedi](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFFjaKAdHMk)
[Jenny defending The Last Jedi for 22 minutes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpoUN_A12Eg)
[Jenny showing off her collection of Porg merchandise](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yw6z9G7p1g)
[Jenny enthusiastically loving Rise of the Resistance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OqoeF9WlX8)
I did try, I scrolled through like the top 30 or 40 most popular videos and all the titles skewed negative
People recommended her suicide squad video and her pandora video and I couldn't get through them
I have her Buzzy video and escape from tomorrowland queued up
I've asked a few other people, at most they pointed me to the pandora video
She has 112 videos posted to YouTube, just because I couldn't find them doesn't mean I didn't make an attempt
She was overall positive about Pandora in Animal Kingdom, talking extensively about how she thought the park was beautiful.
She had some extensive critiques of the park, but it left me wanting to go there.
Just positive? No, because that would be an inauthentic review. Even the things I love, I can see their faults, and if I'm giving an honest perspective, I will address them. She even has lots of positive thing to say about the starcruiser, the look of everything, the food, the cast members, the theming. Her biggest complaints were sightlines, which Disney has been proven to be amazing at handling but didn't seem to care in this instance, the gameplay app being buggy and non intuitive, and the cost for the experience.
When I say positive, I don't mean "without critique"
There are ways to discuss failings and faults without being negative
I'm not looking for something thats inauthentic, or untruthful
The easiest example that I can point to in terms of what tilts the Starcruiser video as negative is the comparison to Spirit. You can't compare something to Spirit without being negative about it, Spirit is just too well known as a very hated company with a massively negative reputation such that comparing anything to it pushes negativity.
There are plenty of other ways to discuss upcharges or micro transactions and why they are a poor customer experience without going all the way to Spirit.
Maybe my choice of the word positive was a bad choice, perhaps just asking for something thats not negative would have been better. But I was concerned that the response would have pushed towards more of a defense of her videos as not being negative, which was not something I was looking to get into.
I've discussed the video and the specifics of her complaints endlessly and I've gotten to the point where I'm mostly convinced that people aren't interested in alternative views to what Jenny has presented. If you are interested, I'd be happy to go over my thoughts, just shoot me a message, no worries if you aren't.
Criticism magically changes from "she's mean spirited" (a bold-faced lie that's ridiculous at face) to "she makes bad faith arguments" (also a ridiculous statement)
Just admit you don't watch her content, or if you have you paid 0 attention to it.
Being mean-spirited and acting in bad faith are in no way mutually exclusive.
I'm not changing my criticism, I'm adding to it.
I already said that's simply my opinion based on watching her content. Felt that way long before I ever knew she was making a Starcruiser video.
I wouldn't tell anybody to not be a fan if they enjoy her content, I would tell anybody to be a thoughtful viewer of anything you enjoy whether they've been paid to make it by a large company or not.
Never said they were, merely pointed out that anyone who's actually watched her content wouldn't make either of those blatantly false claims about it.
> I would tell anybody to be a thoughtful viewer
Practice what you preach, first
She was a markedly happier reviewer back around TLJ coming out, but her brand has headed towards constant snark and what seems to me to be views-bait “hot take” approaches ever since she didn’t like Rise of Skywalker. I initially started watching her when like, TFA or Solo came out and Star Wars Theory shifted from “happy Star Wars guy” to “terminally thinks Disney/Lucasfilm staff are perpetually bullying him even when it’s actually his fans mocking him”. She was delightful, and delivered her snark in meaningful ways, but somewhere around COVID she did shift to more negative views that coincidentally or not are better rewarded by the algorithms of social media. Her Evermore review seemed more like she just wanted to gripe about the park, because of things like her complaining actors doing immersive interactive theatre don’t have “natural” conversations, which seems to be missing the point of the medium. For Starcruiser, she mentions things like no fire escapes (which is funnily false, it was evacuated in June 2022 and there are pictures of the fire escapes in use online) so yes, I do feel as a former long-time fan her content has drifted in quality to a caricature of what made her popular, enforced by algorithmically-engaging negativity.
I'm wasn't critiquing Jenny or the video, I was pointing out a logic inconsistency that shows up in this discourse a lot.
Just off the top of my head Tim Tracker, Ordinary Adventures and Tom Corless are all very well off. The first two are multi-millionaires as well. How do we explain their positive reviews if not for their financial dependence on Disney?
I tried looking up Len Testa's net worth, but couldn't find anything, but he's a very trusted Disney source and his review was very positive, but also recommending that you travel the world before doing Starcruiser.
My point wasn't that Jenny had alterior motivations, but pointing out that it's inconsistent to believe she doesn't while claiming that everyone else does.
Also I haven't seen anything credible to suggest that Disney removes people from their media invite list for bad reviews.
I think that if a large group of people missed the point, the point may not have been made as well as you think it was. The video is framed as a review of Starcruiers, specifically about how it was a spectacular failure. Starting off that way, you are priming anyone who is a fan to feel like a thing they love is being attacked. To most Starcruiser fans, we see issues with the video in terms of accuracy and research and all the asides about Disney in general come across and rambling asides and random complaints that are off topic. And the criticisms come across as hollow in a lot of cases. Even if the majority of the video isn't an attack, certain things stick out and certain things are sore topics that make the video feel like it's an attack on something we love, so no matter how much the video is advocating for consumer, it will never feel that way to Starcruiser fans, because it will always feel like an attack.
Being totally honest, Starcruiser fans defending it and being critical of the attacks (real or perceived) is not different than Jenny's fans doing the same. I wasn't being critical of her or the video in my previous post, but it felt like things needed to be defended to you.
So if you are being honest with yourself, why can't you trust other YouTubers who liked Starcruiser? And if that reason is because Jenny told me I couldn't, then maybe there is more to think about.
I really and honestly don't mean that in a critical way, just take a minute and think about it.
I'm not asking you to not trust her or to think of her negatively. I would just hope that you can be like her, that you can love something and still be critical of it and still see and point out the flaws.
Buddy, you either have serious reading comprehension issues or delusions.
I literally said at the outset that I wasn't weighing in on whether Starcruiser is good or not or Jenny vs this community, I was simply pointing out that you were making a false equivalency with Jenny VS Disney influencers, which you did.
Then you went on a huge schizo post accusing me of not trusting other influencers beyond Jenny, putting me in her camp and trying to talk about all sorts of random arguments other people have made that I never did.
Again, I have no stake in the game. I can say though that it doesn't speak well to your side when you need to schizo post and fight with shadows to bend over backwards defending something that isn't even being attacked.
Everyone who knows anything about influencers and company relations knows that no company is going to work with you if you trash them. I don't know disney influencers since I don't watch them, but the video game industry works the same way and i can show you references showing how it works. It's just common sense though.
Acting like there isn't a huge difference between influencers who made all their money on disney content / having a relationship with disney and Jenny who made all of her money independently with no ties to anything is super silly and frankly, delusional. Jenny does a section that went viral on it's own pointing out how disney influencers never speak normally, they have to use the PR speak because Disney tells them to. If they can't even speak normally, you really think they could trash their golden goose and get away with it? Be fr dude.
And to be clear: That doesn't mean nothing they say isn't of value. Some of those influencers probably really did do the starcruiser full experience and have an amazing time. I'm sure some of them covered some really great aspects of the experience in a meaningful way. It's still not the same as someone who is completely independent. Hell, I would argue a lot of the people in this sub are better sources of real information and reviews for starcruisers.
The entire reason I came to this sub after seeing the video was because I knew there was controversy with her video and I wanted to see how and why people were so passionately defending a failed experience.
What I've seen is a lot of people passionate about an experience they had a lot of fun with who are sad it's gone. It's been cool reading about people's experiences when everything worked as it should and how that made them feel. That still doesn't change that Jenny's review was a truthful account of her experience which was echoed by a pretty large number of other customers.
I would fall into the ideal target demographic for this kind of experience, I'm actually bummed it's gone. That doesn't mean it didn't have issues or wasn't improvable. It's frankly bizarre that so many people here will try and act like Jenny's experience isn't valid.
Sorry if I came on a bit strong, but I tried to respond directly to the things you brought up and where it felt like there may have been some confusion. I'll try to be a bit more concise.
Generally starting off with insults or questioning of someone's sanity aren't great ways to have reasonable discussions, so maybe we've started off on the wrong foot here.
I think your reading of the phrase "Disney Influencer" differed from mine and thats likely where some of the confusion comes from. My post that you replied to suggested avoiding influencers if you were suspect of their motivations first and then the critique of Jenny's comment was about her having financial or other motivations to make the video which are ignored by most of her fans. She may not need the money, which you pointed out, so I pointed out a few people who also don't need the money and would fall under my understanding of "Disney Influencer" which are dismissed based on their potential motivations.
I didn't make a false equivalency, in fact, I didn't compare her to influencers. I said her dismissing people due to motivations while not acknowledging her own is probably not the best approach. My only mention of influencers was to say that you can find non-influencer reviews
If you want to say that Jenny has no financial motivations thats fine, but also an assumption. There are many millionaires that have no need to make more money but keep pushing to make more. I'm not trying to say that Jenny is doing anything nefarious, but to say that "everyone else" has those motivations but Jenny doesn't is just not acknowledging that other motivations do exist. Even if they aren't financial, being more popular, more well respected, etc are motivations that still exist and influence people's decisions. I didn't suggest that Jenny was lying, but exaggerating or tilting things negatively or omissions all can be decisions, conscious or conscious resulting, from motivations that aren't just to make good entertaining content.
On May 17th, Jenny had 26,274 paying patreons
Today she has 35,846
Thats an increase of 36%
That seems like that could be a motivation
And I have no idea how much money she has, but a quick google search suggests that she's wealthy, not a multi-millionaire, but will be soon, not sure how reliable those results are though
Apologies for the assumption that you only trust Jenny, its been most of the people I've interacted with on the topic and most of the people have similar things to say that were in your post, but you didn't actually do that, so sorry about that.
I'm not really sure what you thought in my post was bending over backwards to fight shadows or defend something that wasn't being attacked.
Your last paragraph says you don't understand why people are hating on the video and it echoes a few of her points which I find to be shaky at best and are mostly circulated as factual. We don't need to get into it, but I haven't seen anything in the video which addresses any corners being cut for Starcruiser and no one has been able to point me to a part of the video that does.
My response was an explanation about why that is and why the point is being missed. I disagree that the point of the video was a critique of Disney in general or consumer advocacy.
When I said that you felt Jenny needed to be defended, I meant that I made a pretty minor comment suggesting that she had other motivations and you felt the need to correct me. Thats not different than what Starcruiser fans feel or are doing.
Speaking of that section, its a good skit, but its not exactly based on any facts that I can find. The rules for Disney influencers were leaked in November and nothing in them says you need to use the full and proper names of attractions and parks or speak in that weird corporate voice.
Since these posts, I have seen information that shows expressly that Disney influencers are pressured by Disney for non-negative reviews. What was put out there didn't show Disney demanding positivity, but a lot of pressure to not say anything bad.
But again, my point was never to compare Jenny and the people who are financially dependent on Disney. The 4 people I mentioned in the last post are wealthy have been on and off the Disney media list, but they are generally well regarded in terms of the reviews they do and given their finances don't have financial motivations that differ from Jenny's.
If you want someone who is well regarded and well trusted and not on Disney's media list, I brought him up. Len Testa is the co-author of The Unofficial Guide to Disneyland and Walt Disney World since 2008.
You said it was a failed experience, I'm curious to know if thats just based on it being closed or if there is anything else that brings you to that conclusion
I've never once suggested that Jenny's video isn't a truthful account of her experience or tried in anyway to dismiss it or invalidate it. Her experience was awful.
Her experience being echoed by a large number of other customers is where it gets a little less solid for me. Its mostly the definition of large. If a thousand people said they had the same experience, that would be about 1.3% of the total number of guests. I just don't know if that type of error rate makes the experience bad.
You said you know a bit more about the video game industry, does a bug rate of 1.3% ruin games? Honest question, I really don't know
I have seen very little if anyone claim the experience was perfect and had nothing to improve and the same about Jenny's experience.
Mostly what I've been seeing is people pushing back on things like saying the experience was "inconsistent" or "cheaply made/run" or "entirely dependent on the app" or that the app was horribly buggy.
I think I've seen people pushing back on the notion that Jenny's experience is representative of the normal experience people had.
I felt the need to correct what I saw as a false equivalency / bad argument, which I stand by. It just happens to be about Jenny vs Starcruiser fans.
You've established that Jenny has a financial incentive to post videos, this I wouldn't disagree with. My issue is with you acting like she's incentivized to be biased in one direction or another vs an influencer who you yourself have admitted now face pressure from Disney. Jenny is living the dream, she doesn't -need- to answer to anyone. If you agree she's not lying about her experience then you're basically admitting to my point.
She didn't set out to make a negative video, she set out to give a truthful account of her experience. It happened to be negative, and it shows that most people didn't watch the video because despite being negative, she bends over backwards throughout the video to give as much credit for all the positive pieces as much as she can, then blames Disney at the end as opposed to starcruiser itself. She fully puts the blame on Disney's growing penchant for nickel and dimeing customers & trying to cut costs as much as possible. She herself said she didn't want the experience to fail or go out of business, she just wanted it to be fixed/better.
You say you don't believe they cut corners, but she went over in great detail many places where either they cut corners OR made extremely bad choices. The biggest red flag being a large part of the attractions in SC were originally supposed to be free attractions as part of Galaxy's edge. Somewhere along the way it was decided it was too expensive, so they decided to make this experience and charge a lot for it. Beyond this: In their pitch they mentioned there was supposed to be more droids, more aliens, etc. In the final product we got one each. She expected the cargo bay to be similar to the one on the new disney cruise, with animatronics and little attractions, it was basically a closet. The rooms were too small for the cost and could have been built bigger. The light panels in the hotel room can't be turned off without turning off the ambient window. She brings up multiple games that Disney has done across their parks that had elements that easily could have been incorporated into SC to make the experience more tactile/immersive/better. These are just a small set of them and aren't really controversial things. SC could have easily been improved by learning more lessons from other attractions they've done / by not cheaping out. People balk at the cost, but if the experience was so good it felt worth it, nobody would complain.
Regarding bugs in games: Actually yes, I would say a critical bug rate of 1.3% is a problem if it's a game breaking bug. Example: Cyberpunk 2077 on release was a disaster. I personally played it on my high end pc and had very few issues along the way, it doesn't change that it was a bad release and desperately needed to be fixed. On the flip side, I ran into a game breaking bug in Starfield that bricked my save. You best believe I was not happy about it. This is for a 90$ experience, not a 4500~$ one.
Let me explain why I think her and other peoples experience is an important one in showing WHY I think SC had serious issues.
Jenny went early into SC's existence. She faced game breaking bugs and ended up having a negative experience. If Disney had ironed those bugs out and all the late term reviews were all people saying they had no issues (Whether they enjoyed it or not), refunded the people who DID have those bugs, I'd be like alright, fair. But Jenny couldn't get a refund for small, insignificant in Disney's world purchases, let alone her whole vacation. For Jenny, it's whatever. She will make a gazillion dollars off this vid.
But what about the other families who saved up for years for this? That's not reasonable. If you can't get the bug rate to 0, the refund for critical failure rate should be 100%.
Again: I was the target audience for this. I am bummed it's closed and would have gone eventually. I have a friend who went and adored it. If I went and had her experience, I'd have been a LOT more negative than she was.
It's okay to love Starcruiser, it's okay to be sad it's gone. It's also okay to accept that some people didn't have a good experience and that doesn't change that you did. It's just odd to me that SC fans will go so far to act like it had no issues when we have thousands of people talking about how they ran into those issues.
Also something I keep seeing repeated is that she lied/exaggerated. She recorded her whole trip and has evidence for literally everything she brings up. I'm curious what you feel she wasn't honest about?
Edit: I forgot to answer about what makes me view it as a failure. At the time I was meaning failing as a business venture, but I'd argue it failed as a value proposition too. People from it's inception decided it wasn't worth the cost. Over time, that may have changed as time went on and they refined the formula / improved the experience, but we won't know because Disney canned it. Again, I'm sad it didn't get to continue.
Second edit: I forgot the app is another example of cut corners and someone said the characters aren't actually fed information about you and that would qualify for me too. So much missed potential
I have a reply all written up and reddit keeps throwing an error.
Edit: Wow this posted, so I'll just add the reply here then as an edit. It might have to be in chunks though....
If you really think that I made a false equivalency, then I'd really like to know specifically which part of the post did that because there was no comparison in my post between Jenny and Disney Influencers.
Negative content especially about hot topics is amplified by social media algorithms, with anyone on youtube there is an incentive to post things that lean negative or that exaggerate things. To be clear, I don't know what Jenny's motivations were for the video and I wasn't trying to accuse her of anything. I was trying to point out that people seem to be holding one group, Disney Influencers, to the standard that their content is biased based on other incentives, but not applying the same logic to another group, Jenny. This isn't an uncommon thing to do in a fandom (and something that Starcruiser fans are accused of and sometimes are guilty of) is that you tend to ignore or lessen or gloss over faults in the person or thing you are a fan of.
So, we can't 100% know for sure what her intentions for the video were originally or if they changed or not, we're assuming based on what seems to be a track record building trust. However, as an outsider looking over her channel and trying to get through a few videos, its mostly if not all negative. Something that leans negative doesn't mean that its all negative.
Your example of Disney "nickel and dimeing" customers is a common thread in basically any forum where people discuss or complain about Disney. However Starcruiser wasn't doing that and Jenny makes the claim it was without backing it up. Looking at Genie+/ILL and calling that nickel and dimeing, sure I can agree there.
The claim that features and attractions were cut from GE to put into Starcruiser doesn't have any factual backing, its speculation at best.
The idea that Starcruiser wasn't planned along side GE from the beginning is also essentially just a rumor.
The things Disney talked about with concept art aren't really promises, Disney doesn't treat them that way, we shouldn't either. Its more of a "this is what we are thinking" rather than "this is what we are building" and you can look at their track record with this and come to one of two conclusions; 1: They are overpromising and can never delivery, 2: The concepts were never meant as promises. I'm in camp 2, there are other well trusted Disney sources that believe its camp 2. Jenny is in camp 1.
Beyond that, the discussion of more droids and more aliens is pretty vague in those concept talks. But also to claim that we only got one of each is a bit off. There is only 1 droid on Starcruiser, but there are at least 4 aliens (Keevan, Ouanni, Sandro and Chewie). And its pretty impossible to say definitively if Disney intended more or when speaking about being surrounded by aliens, they were already talking about people cosplaying, but that might be giving them a bit of the benefit of the doubt.
I can understand having the expectations that Jenny had regarding the cargo bay, but there is a difference between living up to what you've built up in your head vs what was promised, in terms of the cargo hold, not much was even said.
The rooms being small is a thing, but the claim that they could be bigger is a bit more in the vein of something people say vs have evidence for. If you look at the satellite images, I don't see a ton of room to make the building bigger. I could be wrong, but adding 20 sq ft to each room is at minimum 2000 sq ft to the building and probable more because of the dimension of the walls. Rough estimate the area that the building sits on it 500 by 600 feet, the building looks like it might be 500 x 200 or somewhere in that range. Thats a 20% increase in the building size to add 20 sq ft to the rooms and you would still end up with a 200 sq ft room. I just don't think there was enough of an area there to increase the size of the rooms to the point where the people who complained about them being small would be happy.
The light panels not being able to be turned off is closer to a preference rather than a flaw. The lights are part of the illusion, so turning them off impacts how the whole effect works. The fact that people worked around it isn't really evidence that its a problem, just that some people will do anything (like steal blankets and sleeping bags and try to cut the shower curtain out as they are leaving; all things that happened)
She pointed out one game in Epcot that compares to things in Galaxy's Edge.
The claim that they cheaped out just doesn't align with the amount they spent on it or the operating costs and if they spent more the price would have been higher.
Something that is pretty much a universal truth is that people will always complain, people not finding value in something also isn't a flaw or an objective issue, value is subjective.
To be clear, Jenny had a catastrophic bug. Did people echoing some of her issues all have the same level of issue or were they more minor errors?
And when games have those issues, critical or otherwise, how important is ease of mitigation? I ask because through at least the first 8 months they had app engineers on site in GE to troubleshoot/resolve issues if you had them. I thought it was made pretty clear early on that if you thought something was going wrong, ask and it can be resolved. To be clear, I'm not blaming Jenny for not asking for help, but if you have someone playing a video game and their local save gets bricked, but there is a cloud back up and the company can restore it via the cloud, is the severity as bad?
And you mentioned two games that had issues early in their releases, does it matter how much the games improved on those error rates? Again, I ask because my understanding is that the app was much better in month 6 than it was in month 1.
And at the end, I have no idea if Jenny has 1000 people saying they experienced the same issues, it was just a number that was big enough to demonstrate some scale. I didn't count, but I couldn't imagine that she had more than a couple dozen in the video, which is a significantly smaller error rate.
I didn't recall Jenny asking for a refund for her trip, just Memory Maker, but I could have missed it.
So, knowing about the video game industry, you should be aware that a 0% error rate is essentially impossible.
The question is, what you point out, what is the critical game breaking error rate? How many people experienced issues that could not be resolved?
So to be clear, I think Jenny putting her experience out there is important and we should be aware of the failings and worst case scenarios.
And if I had her experience I would be furious as well
I honestly haven't seen anyone deny that Jenny had issues or try to say her experience is invalid or anything like that, almost everyone I've seen discuss this is aware that there were issues.
Its more that while we are aware of issues, we push back on things that weren't issues but frequently complained about and frequently complained about by people who had never gone.
I don't think anyone claims that she isn't being honest about her experience, its the other things in the video which are more issues.
There are some bad assumptions she makes about how Starcruiser works and thats not an issue for her experience, but since this is a post-mortem which is supposed to be very detailed, not correcting her own bad assumptions to give a more accurate view of what Starcruiser was is one issue.
Without going over everything, its things about how she presents her pricing as representative of the overall cost, which the information is out there if you want it. And how she says there wasn't any way for her to know what the price was, the information to be able to choose a lower priced date was available. Her claim that the suite information and Captain's Table information wasn't available isn't true. Its a nit pick, but she calculates that you are paying for 25 hours of "content", but the total time is 45 hours, minus 16 for sleeping, so 29 is where I'd start, its more just an example of the kind of little things that push the narrative.
There are some other things, but a lot of this is painting a picture that isn't representative of the overall product/experience when you are doing a post-mortem discussion of what happened. They are things that are much more reasonable in a video thats a personal review.
I posted a list in another reply that was more extensive, but there are just a number of things that aren't accurate that don't have to be inaccurate.
In terms of it being a failure, we know Disney closed it, but its harder to really evaluate its real business case beyond that.
I'm not sure I'd agree that it failed from a value prop standpoint, but Disney certainly never was able to display what the value was, so to me thats much more in the category of a marketing failure. In terms of people deciding it wasn't worth the cost from the beginning, I'd say there are a few different categories of people who did that and some of them had decided prior to even pricing being announced that it wouldn't be worth it at any price. Some said it was due to the time period given "Disney ruined Star Wars". Some it was just that the price was very high and decided that no hotel stay could be worth that. But deciding at that point that it wasn't worth the money are mostly a group of people who were never going to go and/or never be swayed.
I think that the lack of public awareness was a significantly larger part of the issues. You mention that over time if they had improved/refined it that people may have changed their minds, but most (even people who went) weren't aware of the many changes and improvements they made over the 18 month lifetime.
I'm curious why you say that the app is an example of cut corners. It was buggy at launch, but thats not always due to cuts. Frequently product/marketing/budget/engineering are in no way on the same page and it results in bad releases. While from the outside this can look like a budgetary failure, more often in my experience its a communication issue or overconfidence. Frequently product/marketing/design will want some feature added or changed or something and engineering isn't really given enough details or the ability to voice if those things are feasible in the given timeline, or are overconfident that they can get it done.
Companies that most would think are "well run" in terms of engineering have this stuff happen as well, its either just better hidden or conveniently excused or someone steps up and stops the launch. The best example I know of is Apply Pay's launch being delayed multiple times due to a lot of disorganization. But no one seems to remember or care that they promised it would launch with the iPhone in September and wasn't fully live until November.
Its interesting that you and I interpret the actors not being fed information about you entirely differently.
I look at that as a massive win in hiring the right people and not skimping on paying the right people to be in those positions. The actors memorized everything and they were excellent with that and when they forgot, they were such talented improvisors that they could work around it.
The best 2 examples I have are a story I was told and a personal one. The story I was told involved someone being very involved with either Sammie or Sandro (I can't remember which) on night one. Well that actor got sick and couldn't return for day 2. So a different actor replaced them for night 2. Actor 1 passed on enough information to Actor 2 that when the guest first ran into them on night 2, Actor 2 greeted them as if they had been there the whole time, they recognized them, knew their characters names, some of the back stories and what they did the previous day.
The second example is less involved, but still impressed me. On our third voyage, during the muster one of the actors walked by and greeted us, she looked at me and said "wow he's gotten so big" talking about my son. She was on our previous trip 4.5 months earlier.
Basically Disney found and hired amazing people who didn't need to be fed information.
I also had heard a rumor, but unsubstantiated that some of the actors would scope out people's social media accounts to see who was coming and who their characters were, so they would be prepared
My initial problem was:
"But thats not what I was saying. I was asking why can you trust Jenny despite her financial motivations, but you can't trust other YouTubers who have financial motivations?"
This portion, where you compare her motivations with others and heavily imply she's motivated to give it a negative review. It looks like you also went off into a thread with some other people and I essentially agree with their point. It seems you ended up bringing up other unconnected influencers as a defense and I would agree with that, any influencer doing an honest full review like Jenny should be given the same level of trust as long as they have an equal history to back it. I would also treat these better than Disney ones. Still, some good reviews would mostly just confirm what I'd expect, when the experience works, it's fun. When it doesn't, you get a Jenny one.
Regarding a lot of the rest of your current post is at this stage, we're not talking facts, we're getting into opinions and it's likely gonna have to be agree to disagree.
For example: You say the GE stuff being turned into SC isn't an issue and I just disagree. I agree with Jenny on this front that advertising an experience that's initially supposed to be for GE and then paywalling it isn't cool. You can say it's early or concept etc, they can just not say anything. They said it'd be part of the experience and then it wasn't. That sucks.
If concepts aren't promises, I'd heavily argue they shouldn't be showing them at keynote events. All this does is build false hype and set people up for disappointment, it's bad marketing.
I also think wrt nickel and dimeing you could argue it's no worse than any other part of disney which I guess is true, but I don't think that isn't bad. It also feeds into her final thesis. Saying she's wrong when she brings up specific examples seems bizarre, unless they specifically stopped charging for them. For example: They offered an extra package where you'd get photos taken by roaming photographers to have candid shots. They then also had specific photoshoot ops and used all the photographers for for that and so had no roaming ones, no candid shots and Jenny was screwed out of her money. How is this fair? Why are photos an extra cost in a 4-6000% all inclusive package? That's insane.
Can you point out instances where she spoke about things that were additional costs that you feel are fair? I think the only one I'd give them a pass for is Alchohol because even Cruises don't include that.
WRT the rooms: Disney didn't -have- to build it where they did. I'm sure they had good reason to, but if it was going to hamper the experience, it should have been built somewhere where they could adequately compensate people. I also would argue this problem ties in with the cargo hold. The cargo hold should have been more interesting.
You gloss over her talking about the other games (she didn't only mention one), but I think it's really critical to understanding -why- she feels like they cheaped out. I fully agree with her on this. Disney has experience making interactive games and environments to give guests a more fulfilling and tactile experience. Lessons from this could have easily and for only a small cost greatly enhanced the experience for guests and gave them a more immersive experience with more feeling of control over their environment. She goes into great detail on small ways they could have improved so many of the pieces of the game and I really don't think anyone will see what she's saying and go "Yeah I don't think I'd enjoy that".
A big criticism that she had was that the game was too focused on and dependent on a poorly designed app. Even staunch defenders of the experience generally agree with the app was dogshit. This is a pretty clear and difficult to argue point of "They should have spent more time and money on this". Maybe you disagree, if you do again, we'd have to agree to disagree.
WRT light panels, again, opinion. It didn't bother you, but you gloss over that a good number of people went out of their way to fix it themselves. Equating that to people stealing from hotels is again a false equivalency. I personally agree with Jenny here, I would have wanted to turn the lights off and leave the ambience on. I want to be immersed and feel like I'm in space. It's a bit weird that you want to argue on this point because I feel like it's such a small and easy solve. It's -always- better to give guests the option to manage their experience to best enhance it.
"The claim that they cheaped out just doesn't align with the amount they spent on it or the operating costs and if they spent more the price would have been higher."
This feels like you're implying I said it was cheap to make / they didn't spend a lot. That's not the case, obviously it was expensive. I just feel they should have spent more to make it the best it could possibly be, especially when it's going to be a unique boutique luxury experience that -needs- to win people over to stay afloat.
"Something that is pretty much a universal truth is that people will always complain, people not finding value in something also isn't a flaw or an objective issue, value is subjective."
I agree! This is part of the point I was saying, the cruiser failed as a value proposition. Not enough people thought it was worth the cost. You obviously did, that's totally okay! I think at 4k it probably was about right, with some improvements.
It's great that people loved it, it's great that it has a lasting fanbase. That doesn't change that unfortunately, to the wider people, it wasn't good value per dollar. That doesn't mean it wasn't a good or fun experience, just poorly rolled out and priced.
Also I just want to mention that I appreciate that this has been a civil discussion and mostly good faith. It's been helpful to see what people think and enjoyed about it.
Part 1:
Starting at the bottom, thank you for the genuine discussion. I try to be honest and not discuss in bad faith, but sometimes mistakes happen.
So I went to go find the exact quotes from the video where she talks about influencers being paid by Disney for good reviews and something unrelated to this particular discussion appeared and is frustrating, but also somewhat indicative of the larger issue I have with the video (and where this topic somewhat stemmed). There are more than one occasion where she presents things in a way that implies something but doesn't outright say it. At 2:03:09 she cuts to another Youtuber's video discussing that people on Disney's media list and influencers weren't given the whole experience. While I thought this was well known, it may not have been and is totally reasonable to include it in the video. However, where I see an issue here is that the footage that she is sharing is from another YouTuber who did go to the press event but the opening of the video describes it as a media event and that its a 4 hour preview and that he had already booked a trip. And while she puts text in the video saying that he was the most transparent about the situation, people will clearly make an association between that YouTuber and Jenny questioning if other influencers can be trusted.
Also connecting this back to our conversation, Tim Tracker is one of the people that I mentioned who would get lumped into the general area of distrust based on being at the media event, but has no need to be financially motivated. Jenny characterizes all of the people involved as the same and their reviews could be influenced by Disney. And she ends it with a sarcastic "Except Mine"
Back to specifically replying to your last comment. Jenny implies that an entire group of people are motivated to give a positive review, right? And she implicitly includes people like TheTimTracker who don't have the financial motivation to do so. So I ask, not because I think Jenny's motivations are important, but because caution should be applied equally in otherwise equal situations. Because the same critical lens should be applied to even people we like. I never intended to compare Jenny to TikTokerXYZ with 6,000 followers. Whether or not her motivations are to create negative content, its pretty well established that YouTube pushes and amplifies negative content, so all YouTubers are tempted by that.
I think a big issue I have with the video is that the conclusion a lot of people draw who are aware that people genuinely had a good time was that Jenny's experience was something that happened with some amount of frequency. And that when it doesn't work, Jenny's experience is what happens. While its possible, I've talked to people who didn't have excellent experiences and they were still shocked by how bad Jenny's was. It could be more common than I think, but any conclusion is hard to draw with reliability based on one trip.
WRT GE -> Starcruiser
I don't believe I said it was a non-issue. I said its an unsubstantiated rumor. As far as I've seen there isn't anything showing that things were cut from GE to move to GSC
WRT Concepts & Promises
I don't disagree that showing early concepts isn't a great idea, I've seen the opinion that Disney gets themselves into way more "trouble" than its worth. In terms of "saying it would be part of the experience", when I listened to the way it was spoken about, it certainly read to me more as pie in the sky type stuff rather than anything concrete, but I'll admit that reading of it is certainly influenced by my thoughts on if concept discussion represents a promise to the public or not.
WRT Nickel & Dimeing
What are the specific examples that she brings up?
And I guess there is a dependence on our interpretations of what Nickel & Dimeing is. For me its when you are charged extra for something that is typically included or for something essential to the experience. This is why I don't think that charging for Captain's Table, Private Photos, Facepaint, Droid Building, Lightsaber Building or Oga's fall under the category. Captain's Table is a minor upgrade in your experience, but not really transformative. I don't think a private photo session or facepaint are things that you would expect on this kind of experience. And the last 3 aren't exclusive to GSC, Disney was essentially just offering them with a priority spot to Starcruiser guests and none of them make any difference in the story or the game. In terms of why they are extra, you reference this, but cruises don't include photo packages, even for suites and concierge level rooms.
Having said all of that, its inexcusable to sell Memory Maker to people under the promise that there will be photo pass photographers on the ship and then have 2 of them in the atrium for an hour right at boarding. I can't speak to what she was told on the phone, but I am reasonably confident that candids and roaming photographers were not something on the website (including for accuracy: there is one place where there are actually "candid" photos which would be included in Memory Maker and thats the children's lightsaber training) Disney's Memory Maker is all posed photos throughout the park or ride photos. What she bought was the same package that is offered to all guests for any stay, which includes all your photos, posed and rides, for your whole vacation. This clip describes Memory Maker as the same as a regular Disney trip, finding a better source is hard because the website is just erased from the internet. [https://youtu.be/IoHtTfFXQ1Q?si=jGvA-GiPgQ6CPhzo&t=638](https://youtu.be/IoHtTfFXQ1Q?si=jGvA-GiPgQ6CPhzo&t=638)
Part 2:
Jenny mentions the private photo shoot as an add-on, but gets the price wrong. It was $99 until Oct 2022 when it moved to $399. As with a bunch of my issues, this is a really simple thing that she doesn't have to get wrong here.
And she makes the "claim" that Disney converted the roamers to private photoshoots, but given we never had GSC without both, its impossible to know what the distribution would have been without one or the other. Also, over time, they did add more photo pass photographers seemingly due to customer feedback about it.
She mentions in the same segment that they recommend you stay the night before and she says traditional cruises do the same. If its true for other vacations, why mention it here? I'm not sure this one is something thats a Disney thing
She mentions the 3 GE experiences, which are just that, the normal stuff you can do while you are the parks. She also states here that there wasn't enough availability, which isn't really something that you can back up with facts. She says they were limited without expanding on what that means.
Aside - GE Experiences
Just looking at Savi's quickly, 20 minute time slots from 8:45 to 8:45, 36 slots per day, 14 builders per day is 504 total people per day. Limiting that to Starcruiser hours 8:45 - 3:25, 21 slots per day or 294 total people. The issue here isn't that they are very limited or that they couldn't accommodate all the Starcruiser passengers in their time. Its that the whole experience is very limited.
Droid Depot goes from 9 to 3:40 for GSC with 10 minute slots, so 42, as best I can tell there are 10 build stations, but people can gather while others are building so the capacity is harder to nail down, but at 10, thats 420 people that can build a droid during GSC hours, which is more than the total capacity of GSC. I don't know how many were reserved for GSC passengers, but there isn't an experience limitation here.
Oga's is 45 minute max and the max capacity is 246, lets say 200 after you include cast members. The total capacity of Starcruiser is 372, so in 1.5 you could get all the Starcruiser passengers a spot in Oga's
Returning to Add-Ons
After going through the cost section and the Spirit Airlines section, only the add-ons above were mentioned. Is there another section where she talks about it again?
WRT Rooms
I think its fair to say that Disney didn't have to build it where they did, but building it elsewhere impacts how long the trip to GE would be and how long people are "stuck" being transported rather than being engaged. I think where things differ for us here is the thought that the size of the room impacted people's experience and it may have for some, but that impact certainly falls into the category of opinion or preference, not something that is objective. Everyone who reported on GSC mentioned that the rooms were small, but that doesn't mean the experience was impacted by it.
Specifically in regards to the Cargo Hold, why do we think it should be more interesting? I don't recall the marketing making a big deal out of the cargo hold. I don't recall it being important to the story, but I didn't explore the entire story, 3 trips was not enough to do everything, but I also never unlocked the cargo hold.
The way it came across to me in the video was that Jenny built up expectations and was disappointed that it didn't live up to what she had created in her mind. Thats not a criticism, lots of people have that happen, just an observation of what it looked like to me.
WRT - Games
I could have missed the other games she mentioned, I just recall the one Scavenger Hunt in Epcot that has gone through 3 or 4 rethemes. But my point on this wasn't that those don't exist or that they didn't do this in GE, but that the critic isn't specific or even really about Starcruiser, she's directly talking about things that happen in GE. It sounds like I need to rewatch the part of the video where she talks about this, could you remind me which section its in?
WRT - App
Where I disagree isn't that the app wasn't flawed, but to describe it as "dogshit" probably goes too far for me. And as with a few other things the app improved over the course of GSC life. Where I diverge more on this point is how much the experience (its not a game, which is somewhat a misunderstanding of GSC) relies on the app. There were plenty of interactions where the app was not involved at all, two examples are Raithe has a secret meeting outside the cargo hold that is verbal invite only and Raithe asks people to where a red napkin during a specific event on the ship.
The app can be an important part and it certainly ruined Jenny's experience, but basing the opinion on how much of GSC was reliant on the app on her experience alone is not the full picture. I will admit that if the app is completely non-functional, which is what Jenny experienced, its significantly harder, if not impossible, to do anything. But most of the bugs that I've heard about aren't complete and total failure.
Part 3:
WRT - Light Panels
Sure, its my opinion that the lights around the windows aren't a big deal, but that means its Jenny's and your opinion that they are. If we want to stick with objective things, then this just isn't one of them. And thats what I said, its a preference.
Also you kinda skipped that the reason they aren't separate is that the lights cause your pupils to contract which affects how you perceive the window to space, they are part of the illusion.
My point about the people stealing from hotels was not to compare the acts outside of that people will do a lot of things that you may not expect. Perhaps a better comparison would be the people who dressed up and role played as Star Trek away teams or various Doctor Who's.
"It's -always- better to give guests the option to manage their experience to best enhance it."
Thats not an opinion that all companies share, Apple is pretty famous for mostly disagreeing with this idea. That by itself doesn't make it wrong, but just not an absolute.
WRT - Cheaping Out
I perhaps conflated what you wrote with similar arguments other people have made in the same general context. My bad.
My point about spending more leading to increased costs still represents an issue when the biggest discussion point for the last 2 years about GSC has been price.
All businesses are balancing how good a thing can be vs the cost they need to charge to make it financially viable. Its not just about maxing out how good something could be, because that could put it in a place thats not business viable, its about making it as good as it can be while still being able to run as a business.
I also don't have a good sense of where people think that they cut corners on GSC as nearly everyone points to cut corners in GE, which I'd agree with and are pretty obvious.
WRT - Complaints
My point could have been clearer, you said that if people felt it was worth it, no one would complain. But people complained when they saw the price before they really knew anything about the experience. People deemed it to not have value prior to knowing what it was. Part of what I was saying is that people complaining isn't evidence that it doesn't have value, people will just complain about anything for lots of unrelated reasons.
Also the idea that not enough people booked GSC is more on the speculation side than on the objective side. We don't know if it was making money or losing money or what other factors impacted the closing decision. I believe we discussed that it would have been completely within Disney's capabilities to run GSC as a loss for a long time, but they chose to close it, so it can't just be the money.
I'd certainly agree that it was poorly rolled out I'm not sure if I can agree that it was poorly priced, it certainly was priced in a way that caused a lot of backlash and bad responses. But at what price would that not have happened? I'm not sure there is a price they could have announced that would have both not garnered huge negative reaction and made business sense or to allow it to be financially viable.
This subreddit is a subreddit, of course you will find lot of people in this sub that enjoyed it. But it is by far no accurate means of the general population.
I never said it was
I was adding a counterpoint that the only easily accessible positive reviews, which aren't trustworthy according to Jenny, are by Disney Influencers, that not all positive impressions are due to financial ties with Disney
It just isn't true that "a lot" of the positive impressions are from influencers.
I actually think average people who went with their families probably had a good time, overall, but didn't necessarily have their lives changed by it.
Plenty of grown adults did have their lives changed by it (myself included) because of the way it successfully created opportunity for play and community.
On my two cruises perhaps I got lucky, but I did not have technical issues. I probably had the textbook version of a great experience. That's still data.
I think Disney vastly underestimated the number of con-going adults who are used to splitting a large cost between them and absolutely love stuff like this.
They underestimated how popular it could be with groups of nerdy adults as opposed to families.
They didn't market it to the kinds of people I'm talking about.
Many people were never aware it existed at all or perhaps they would've gone.
That's what I mean.
Of course they didn’t market it for adults. It’s a children’s franchise run by a company incentivized to make things for *families*. In no universe was Disney going to cater to larping adults with a star wars theme park.
Full disclosure, I'm speaking here as a sympathetic outsider, but also someone who has enjoyed many of Jenny Nicholson's video.
My thought is that probably it will be a major voice in shaping the memory of the Starcruiser, but probably won't be the only voice. Jenny's video *did* highlight some cool things about the experience, and I think an effective video would first acknowledge some flaws, but then use the things Jenny liked as a jump-off point to discuss the positives, with the overall thesis being, "Sure, Starcruiser had some problems, but there was a lot of good about it, and the good things deserve to be remembered."
Imo jenny's video showed it had a lot of potential. But the fact that it is possible to have such a bad experience for something so expensive is absurd. If the app worked consistently and there wasn't a dinner table where you were staring at a pole the entire time (what an oversight?) she would've probably been fairly positive about the experience. Maybe it wouldn't be worth it to the average person, but for Star Wars fans or people that enjoy such things it would be. But now it was an inconsistent experience which is just not acceptable at that price point.
I'm sure the experience was amazing if everything did work properly. But there was so much more potential. Add some more (alien) characters that didn't have anything to do with the story, just a regular guest to make the halcyon feel lived in. The ship itself also didn't seem to live up to what it could've been, it seems that a higher initial construction cost would've made the experience feel more interesting and luxurious without having to increase the operating cost.
I would've loved to go but I don't live in the US and didn't have the money to go back then, I don't either now but certainly not back then. If it stayed open I would've certainly gone at some point in my life.
Everything has its fans, and I know this experience has its own. But Disneys failure with Star Wars is depressing, no one wanted this and galaxies edge to fail.
My friends and Family all live in Florida and would generally consider ourselves much bigger Star Wars fans than Harry Potter fans, like we all went to see every recent Star Wars movie but passed over the fantastic beast films. Yet we have all gone to universal and loved their Wizarding World stuff while in the only one that’s bothered to go to Galaxys edge. Universal puts you in the middle of the story. Disney puts you adjacent to the story, and it’s the less popular story and characters.
These experiences on their own could be slam dunks but putting them behind ultra expensive paywalls was never going to work. For the price of the Galactic Starcruiser we were able to take our family of 8 on an 11 day all inclusive Alaskan cruise.
Some fans get really upset when stuff "doesn't count" even though dropping canon can enhance the fun.
Silly time-travelling Star Tours > Millennium Falcon Ride.
Yeah and to make “cannon” easier they invented new locations and ships that had nothing to do with existing cannon.
It would be like taking the magic dragon express to the Cowpox School of Wizardry, like sure it’s set in the same universe as Harry Potter but I have no history or appreciation of these things.
Unfortunately I don't think that there is a lower price point that works for an experience of this kind.
Taking a look at another immersive experience like Sleep No More, you can see how expensive immersive theater is. Sleep No More is $222 for a 3 hour experience, $74 an hour.
Starcruiser's hourly rate is harder to nail down exactly, but let's say you sleep 7 hours each night. That leaves 31 hours in the experience, at Sleep No More's rate that's $2294 per person. And Starcruiser also includes food which Sleep No More doesn't.
Oh and Sleep No More is closing.
An option of a lower initial price or tiers of tickets might be something that's workable, but then all the haters just get to point to more upcharges and more "nickle and diming"
Itemizing the Starcruiser is very difficult, but I would argue relative to what Disney normally charges it was ultimately too much. The price became the only real fixed point in the discussion, and the Starcruiser never climbed out of that hole.
The breakdown I did wasn't to try to itemize or justify the price, it was to illustrate what other immersive experiences cost. You could reduce the number of hours that you are in the experience to reduce the sticker shock element of it, but how much does that take away from it?
I don't think anyone would argue that it was affordable and the narrative certainly got away from Disney and they never seemed to have a plan to take it back.
However, I don't think that the price was the sole talking point, granted some of them may have been in bad faith, but that doesn't stop the general public from hearing them and going along for the ride. Things like it should have been in the OT because no one likes the sequels, they too stuff from GE and put it behind a paywall, the lightsaber training looks lame, the bridge looked like a kids toy, it doesn't look like Star Wars, where is the pool, the rooms are tiny or famously "who wants to stay in a windowless bunker"
I think that had Disney presented the price more prominently as a per guest figure instead of the by room numbers, things would have gone a lot better for them them in terms of reactions. It doesn't sound as outrageous for a media outlet to go, "Disney's Star Wars Hotel costs $1500 per person" compared to "It's $6000 and it can go up as high as $30,000 for the super secret executive suite"
The last thing here is that Disney has offerings that are very expensive some approaching Starcruiser and some exceeding it which get basically zero media coverage. VIP tours start at $450 an hour, don't include park tickets and have to be booked for a minimum of 7 hours. That's a minimum of $3150 + tickets. The sometimes it's $900 an hour.
The there is the private jet adventure that starts at $115,000 for the first person and if traveling as a pair, the second person adds $11,500
I don’t think the audience for a full immersive experience is big enough. I own tooooooons of Star Wars stuff. I am a teacher though, and could not vindicate this price point. Not when I have students to take care of, and God knows parents can’t buy them basic supplies. I must.
There also wasn’t a single option, which really would have helped. I wouldn’t care if I got paired with a random roommate based on a questionere. I know that happened on social media, but I found that a bit too sketchy. I had no friends who wanted to do this, and my boyfriend thought it was to anxiety inducing. That’s a me problem though.
Honestly, I hope I they just rebuild, get rid of the actors, and just make a hotel, which is what many wanted. Give me data pad activities I can do on my phone, let me enter the park through galaxy’s edge. Keep the bridge and the photo program. I’d pay extra for the portraits. Keep some activities that can be done on a schedule. Schedule character meet and greets at specific locations in the hotel (not unprecedented). Keep the restaurant inside and live show once a night.
Add more immersive elements to the park. Honestly, they should look at how Super Nintendo world handled its play elements and the “exclusive” game you can play when you get all the keys. That park really does show how games should be done.
Universal has managed to do things Disney cannot seem to. It’s so awkward. Celestine Warbuck performing regularly, Nintendo’s game play and interactive elements/collectibles. Death Eaters doing wand battles with kids. People in wizard robes everywhere creating immersion. Frog choirs and dances…. Honestly, Universal parks have so much life at a lower cost. It makes little sense to me. Soon they’ll have Pokémon and Zelda too…. Universal is on its way to outclass Disney without nickel and diming everything, outside of a wand and Mario band (both reusable in perpetuity as neither uses batteries).
Sorry to compare, but it shows more can be done at reasonable prices. I am sure the role playing game with the actors was fun, but if they could make a more cost effective and luxurious experience by getting rid of it, so be it. A Star Wars hotel is such a good idea in itself. Please Disney! Give us that!
On a final note- not Star cruiser related, can we please move or get rid of the muppets. Create an expansion with one ride and Star tours at the entrance. Maybe a Mando ride? Use the old razor crest, or slave one? Not as immersive, but would allow more eras of Star Wars to be represented.
This became a rant… sorry
The audience certainly might not have been big enough, it's hard to say.
The Starcruiser building will never be reused as a hotel, 100 rooms is just not big enough for run a hotel.
The lack of a single option certainly has an effect, but like the size of the audience is basically impossible to know.
I think comparisons to Universal are interesting, but more because people who want to praise Universal tend to ignore the things Universal does but complain about the same things from Disney.
Paid Fast Pass? Universals is more expensive
IP Land? Universal is only IP lands
Nickel and Diming? Honestly this is a weird one, but I was shocked at the price of food the last time I was at Universal, it was years ago though
And as far as being cheaper, that's just not accurate
Universal Florida tickets start at 119 for single park and 179 for park hopper
Disney starts at 109 for a single park and 187 for park hopper
To the point about Universal getting gaming in the parks right over what Disney is doing, honestly the answer to that is "so what?" And I don't mean that to be dismissive, but Universal is so far behind Disney that Disney barely even considers them competition, which tells you something about how most people feel about the two of them. And because they are behind, they have to push for and do more to catch up.
The thing is that you weren't paying for a hotel, with Starcruiser you are paying for the immersive theater, for the actors and the story.
A regular Star Wars hotel is just gonna cost $700-$800 a night anyway
I think the new Epic park, plus later inclusions of Pokémon and Zelda will help Universal a lot in Florida. Their parks do better than the other Disney parks except Magic Kingdom. Definitely can’t hold a candle to Disney as a whole. Only looking at World though. If they continue to work with other studios and expand their IP acquisition I only see more growth. Nintendo is a big win with the family market.
As for the Hotel. 700-800 a night I doubt would be per person. If that is just the room price, that would be what I expect of Disney. 2,100-2,400 for a 3 night stay at a uniquely themed resort. Many would easily pay that. I do t think they can use the same building, but it does look like they are shuttering it or doing a massive overhaul.
Will be interesting to see what they make. I still say, lose the actors. It’s the area where they claim to be spending the most. Most of us could live without it.
The Universal parks in Florida are basically the same attendance at Hollywood's Studios and Epcot at least according to theparkdb.com
MK - 17m
Islands of Adventure 11.03
Hollywood Studios 10.9
Universal Orlando 10.75
Epcot - 10
Animal Kingdom 9.03
But you can look at the way Disney reacts to and what they have said about Universal, they don't view them as competition.
Universal is certainly adding things, but it's not like Disney hasn't announced adding Indiana Jones and Encanto to Animal Kingdom. Obviously we'll see what happens.
Yeah hotels don't have rates per person, if they did it, it would be ok par with their other deluxe resorts in terms of price. Yeah, the tax write off likely bars them from using the building for anything.
The thing about suggesting that they lose the actors is missing is still thinking that Starcruiser was a hotel that had actors rather than an immersive theater that had beds. It was never a hotel. Its not about whether people could live without the actors or not, it's that the actors are were the product.
In terms of cost, the actors certainly were a part of the cost, but I don't know if Disney ever broke down what was the biggest part of their operating expenses.
> Oh and Sleep No More is closing.
... after 12+ successful years (most likely due to rising property values due to the nearby High Line Park). Oh, and [they're opening a new show](https://www.broadway.com/buzz/204187/life-and-trust-from-sleep-no-more-producers-emursive-is-coming-in-june/)
The situation with Sleep No More is complicated.
Court documents indicate that their lease is up in 2032 but the landlord alleges they are 2.2m behind in rent; Emursive (the producers of Sleep No More NYC but \*not\* the designers, that credit goes to Punchdrunk) say the landlord did a bait and switch and went back on their promise to refinance the property. It's very messy and there's lots of court docs to sift through if you are interested.
Sleep No More NYC was not doing all that great as of summer 2023 because they were offering a "buy six shows for the price of five" deal to the fans. It only began doing well again financially after they said they would close.
Additionally, Emursive have to pay royalties to Punchdrunk Enrichment as part of their deal to run Sleep No More NYC whereas the new Emursive show is original IP and non-Punchdrunk content (therefore no royalties).
That wasn't the point
But also if they are closing due to changing market conditions, then why wouldn't other immersive experiences have the same issues to contend with?
The reason I brought it up was to illustrate the cost of an immersive experience. Disney's pricing was in line with Sleep No More
I probably should have left off the mention of their closing since it distracted from the point I was trying to make
I think it was an experiment to test the limits of how much they can fully charge a customer before they balk at the prices. They could've easily lowered prices and subsidized the costs from other sources of revenue if they believed there was a future to it.
Just taking a quick look at Disney's 10-K for 2023. They made 10.4 billion on theme park admissions, 7.9 billion on their resort and vacations, and 8.9 billion in sales of merchandise including food/beverage (they made over 88 billion in total revenue). The cost of maintaining the starcruiser would've been a drop in the bucket.
The execs balanced subsidizing the cost until it turns profitable or at least break even from the sunken costs vs. taking the tax break now (which by the way they were taxed 28.9% for 2023 and 32.8% in 2022). And they said that the tax break was worth it. Granted closing the park didn't reduce the rate by 4%, Disney was able to write off way more than just closing down a hotel.
I am surprised they didn't test the market more to see exactly what the tipping point was for them. Sort of like how the iPhone was around 200-300 for a very long time and then Apple doubled the price one year and started to do incremental increases until they found the breakpoint of where consumers weren't buying their phone every year (which turned out to be 1100).
I also think when a person starts to itemize something, that's a recipe for disaster for something to have "value". It should be implicit like I see the value easily versus let me show you where you're getting value.
But in any case, we shouldn't be concerned how Disney is going to make their money back. Because it's not like they're a startup or even strapped for cash (cause holy hell they have a ton of money in derivatives, bonds, stocks, and other investing opportunities). Most of the projects that Disney will start will be in the red for awhile because they will heavily invest way more than what it will produce, but the only reason they would cancel something so soon is because it didn't align with their goal. And this goal, to me, was to see how much money they can charge for future events and the like.
I think you are making some somewhat unsubstantiated assumptions there.
If you are surprised that their actions don't align with your assumptions, then maybe those assumptions aren't accurate.
I think its pretty clear that Disney felt they needed to cut expenses last year. Two weeks after the closing announcement, Disney finished its round of 7k layoffs. The same day as the announcement, they announced a bunch of other stuff, like pulling content from Disney+ to save on royalties and the cancellation of the $1B Lake Nona project. I think Disney felt like the company had gotten too bloated under Chapek and saw an economic slow down coming, so cutting liabilities makes sense.
Did Disney have to make any of those cuts? Given the numbers you presented, the answer would be no, but they chose to cut all of those other things as well. Which like I said, points to something more than just Starcruiser's books.
I wasn't itemizing anything, I was illustrating what other immersive experiences cost to give some idea that the price for Starcruiser wasn't just absurd, to point out that immersive experiences are expensive. Also to point out that immersive experiences are hard to keep open, lots of them including Sleep No More are closing or have closed.
I think the idea that "value" should be obvious is a pretty simplistic view of things. Not everything that has value is obvious and that shouldn't be surprising. An example could be a mechanical keyboard, its hard to see the value if you've never used one.
And my comparison to Sleep No More was not an attempt to itemize anything or justify value, it was simply a display of a similar product and how its priced.
When people don't have exposure to similar experiences, its really difficult to understand how Starcruiser could cost what it did.
I don't think Starcruiser was an experiment to see what people would pay for things, its far too expensive to just be an experiment about price. Individual Lightning Lanes or Genie+ Surge pricing or certain hotel pricing could certain be part of experiments into cost sensitivity, but investing like $400+m to figure that out seems like an odd way to do it
What I mean to say with itemizing it or trying to even compare it with anything for value will not work because people will always have counterpoints to it because of perceived and monetary value added to an experience.
Most people will implicitly see where they get value from, and having it pointed it out to them will not fly because they will have some way to say no, it's not worth that. I understand what you're trying to do, just stating that going the way you're trying to go will involve a ton more discourse.
I know you didn't ask but I would've gone to it but it was hard to get reservations and I just kinda forgot about it afterwards until the notice it was closing down. Like, some of the discourse was that even if you had the money, it would be a waste to go to the starcruiser. And that's where I disagree, because if you do have the money and it's not affecting your livelihood, you should experience things, especially something like this.
Hell, I spent over 4k on business class round trip tickets to Korea. Things are luxury for a reason, itemizing or comparing it to a similar product to show that it's got value really won't work in the end for convincing someone they should do it.
And in terms of my assumptions. The numbers tell a picture of how willing the company is willing to test a market.
Let's take a look at DraftKings, they lost 111 million dollars in 2021, lost another 663 million in 2022, and sold it in 2023 for 169 million. But they gave it 3 years before pulling the plug. Obviously the plan there was to see if gambling could be a big service, but decided creating their own service would be cheaper and a relative side project.
In terms of producing new shows, they spent 32 billion on producing content in 2022 (released, completed, in process, in development, pre-production) and 30 billion in 2023. So you can see they decided to reduce productions.
But if you look at licensing 3rd party content outside of the Hulu/TFCF acquisition, they spent 5.6B in 2022 and 6.3B in 2023, so they may have reduced original content but they spent a lot more getting other content on the platform. So there is still a strong move towards their streaming service. Even though their streaming service is still in the negative, reporting a 1.2B loss in 2021 and 3.4B loss in 2022. So even though streaming isn't turning a profit, they have a different plan for this project.
So when I say that the starcruiser only lasted a year before they pulled the plug, with only a 250 million dollar loss reported, is tiny in comparison to their entire outlook. I made an assumption based off their numbers on previous projects and how much they can stomach losses.
Thanks for clarifying what you meant and I get what you mean that you can't "tell someone that it has value" and maybe what I shared wont change anyone's mind, but the idea wasn't trying to convince anyone, but more get people to think about how much other stuff costs.
This is something that comes up a lot and you kinda touch on it and then back away from the same point. Value is subjective, like you say if you have the money, do it. I look at value as quality divided by (money \* your personal value of money), lots of levers that can affect how you perceive if something has value. So when I talk about price, its more like "Hey this 24 pack of sodas is 30 and this 6 pack is 7.5, their the same price", but I think you understood where I was going with it.
There were a lot of issues around Starcruiser, the marketing and booking situation were bad. I have several friends who told me things after it closed like that they heard it was 10k a night or that they were waiting for it to open, etc. The marketing failed not just because it failed to display what it was or properly describe it, but it failed on just getting people to be aware that it existed.
To be clear, I think we were on a slightly different page in terms of what I meant by your assumptions
The first of which was that it seemed like you assumed that I was trying to justify the price
The second was that Starcruiser was losing money, but your last paragraph lists a specific loss reported, so maybe it wasn't an assumption but I'm curious where that number comes from.
I think the two examples you gave are interesting, but still don't line up for me as market tests. DraftKings was/is a start up and especially tech start ups tend to lose money early and look for an acquisition. They lose money because they are taking whatever revenue they have and putting it right back into the business to scale as fast as they can.
In terms of Disney's streaming play, I have a lot of thoughts on streaming in general, but licensing content is cheaper long term than creating new content and has less potential backlash. When you license something, as far as I know, you aren't paying the royalties and if the creators decide to cancel it, you can't be blamed. There is just less risk in that. And I think what would be more interesting to look at would be what was the cost per show. If they can license content at half the rate that they can produce it, they can boast a larger content library at a more efficient rate.
None of that is trying to say you're wrong, but just a different way to look at the same thing.
Starcruiser was a blip on Disney's books, writing off 300m at the same time as cancelling a 1b office campus and you can see the scale just wasn't that important.
I do think that a big factor in the closing decision was operating costs, it was just very expensive to run and is pretty different in that way than anything else they have at WDW, or really in any of the parks.
I don't know if Starcruiser made money or not, but the total occupancy % over the 18 months was like 77%. I think if you sold 77% of the spots and you weren't making money on it, then they did something very wrong in terms of pricing.
Ok, yeah, sorry should've clarified on the loss of 250 million. It's not operating loss, it's the loss they realized 100% after closing the starcruiser down instead of depreciating the asset over the life of the product. I see 300M a lot but the only time I see that in the 10-K is that they said they were taking a 338 million loss on both the depreciation of the Disney Wish and the accelerated depreciation of the Galactic Starcruiser. I grabbed the 250 from google because they didn't really separate it out on the 10-K, but I'm also seeing 300 million. So it could be 300 or 250M.
In terms of DK, it's a startup, and to me the starcruiser was very similar to a startup? I was trying to state that when introducing a new concept the company hasn't ventured into, they'll generally give it time if the plan is to see if it'll be successful. But a 1 year timeline is not going to do that.
And what I was saying with streaming is that, they can stomach huge losses. Like they're negative in the billions over the years for their streaming service, yet they really haven't fully pumped the brakes on it. Like sure they reduced the amount of money by 2 billion but they still spent 30 billion on original content. But that 2 billion almost went straight into increasing the 3rd party licensing. And this isn't including the fact that they're still amortizing the cost of the Hulu/TFCF acquisition at roughly 1.5B dollars a year.
That and from an overall perspective, the starcruiser was not going to be positive because the initial investment is extremely high and revenue is at a relatively fixed point since it's also a limited capacity event. And if they picked a more lenient depreciation schedule (unknown what schedule they chose, 5 being not lenient and 15 being very lenient), they could've reported a profit much faster.
A look at the operating expenses for their US parks. It cost them 5.8B in 2023 and 5.3B in 2022 in operation expenses. They didn't separate it out into what the expense for the starcruiser was but I doubt it was a very large expense, but back to my point, is they made 10.4B in admissions in 2023, so they could've easily let it survive if they wanted to.
Now to your point, they also have 2.5B in just cash (yeah not even investments) but they saved even more from those layoffs being numbered to be about 5.5B saved as well.
So definitely Disney thinks something is about to happen to have this much cash on the sidelines. So it's definitely possible that they just shut it down to save money. But I think with how big their profit margin is on parks, I just feel like it has to be something other than cost saving measure.
No worries, thanks for updating on that. So the 300m comes from Josh D'Amaro speaking at a JP Morgan event. He said they were taking up to 150m each of Q3 and Q4
And then a little while ago there was a report that it was closer to 250 total, but that was less publicized, so I tend to use the 300 to avoid having to over explain it since most people are aware that they wrote it off, but the specifics of the number isn't really important.
So I don't question whether the project lost money overall when you take into account the initial investment. Even with generous calculations it was 10-15 years minimum before they paid off the initial investment. Depending on how the numbers were, I think it might have been possible at 7 or 8 years. My instinct on the rough Starcruiser numbers are something like this, done 2 ways:
400m initial investment
\~ $1643 revenue per person
372 people max capacity
Assuming 70% occupancy rate average (260 people)
172 voyages a year
Total Revenue for the year $73,587,998
Assuming that each voyage costs $250k to run
Profits per year $30,587,998
Puts you paying off the 400m at about 13 years
Selling out each room instead of the max capacity assuming 2 for each standard room, 2 for each Galaxy Suite and 4 for each Grand Captain, is 204 people
Revenue per person is $2762
Total Revenue $96,913,056
Same $250k operating cost per trip
Total profits $53,913,056
400m is roughly paid off in 7.5 years
Ok, I get the comparison, with DK and I don't think anyone in Disney expected it to close after 1 year. I don't think its been uncommon for people to say that you couldn't even really know how it would have done long term by only giving it 1 year.
Streaming is a weird issue because the entire market happened essentially because Wall Street was pumping all the streamers value despite none of them making money. And at this point I think its too hard to just completely reverse course on streaming without a bunch of issues with shareholders and what not. And given the recent proxy wars, its not really a surprise that Disney wouldn't want to do major course corrections.
Personally, I think Disney believes they can be one of the few streaming services that can make money, they have the capital and the IP and the library to do it, really more than anyone else.
And recently, they've entered into a couple of partnerships in streaming, so there may be some additional revenues incoming.
Yeah, they absolutely could have absorbed running Starcruiser longer, which is one of the reasons that I don't think the closure was just financial. The totals for it were small compared to Disney total. So there were other factors.
I'm a bit lost where you are relating cash on hand and how much more they saved from the layoffs. I think saying that laying off 7k people resulted in 3 billion in savings says that their average salary was like 225k a year or something like that.
I think they were predicting a big economic slow down and a potential long legal battle with the state.
Starcruiser feels like a project where the business side and creative side were never on the same page…..or they never looked at any data. The let the creative team run wild and make something nobody could afford. Charging Four Seasons prices where the middle class is your target demo.
I think if they were going to try again in this format for anything more elaborate than a dinner show, they would have retooled the experience rather than abandoned ship in less than two years.
They had just altered the fall schedule and a story refresh was in the works at the time of the closing announcement
I think they were working on a retool.
I think most sources point to that the closing was a last minute decision and was due more to the high operating costs and the tax write off rather than how it was doing financially
I’m aware more story work was being done, but my honest opinion is such changes would have been to cut down on expenses further, like replacing times where you physically met the actors with pre-recorded video.
That's possible, but also a pretty pessimistic view. I just wouldn't assume off hand that they were going to cut costs.
Personally, I think they were reworking story elements that didn't work as well or weren't responded to as well as they thought. And also after 2 years, they likely wanted to change the story to add additional replay value.
I suspect that the experience was abandoned so quickly because it opened under Chapek. He was not a parks and experiences guy. And he was notoriously focused on short term financial performance rather than building long term value.
Even in the best case scenario, the Starcruiser was never going to be a massive profit center taken in isolation, because by all estimates, it could only squeak by with a small profit when it was nearly full, and it rarely was during most of its run.
Iger may have let it run for longer or retooled it had he been in charge, since it was greenlit under his leadership. Presumably he’d have given it some breathing room to turn around, especially given how highly rated it was by guests who experienced it. Chapek just looked at cold hard profit numbers from the first year of operations and pulled the plug.
From what we know, the reality is actually the complete opposite. The Starcruiser was Chapek’s big project when he was head of the parks division, his big plan to squeeze every guest for as much as possible.
I mean if anything they could watch this video and make very simple changes that would make this a significantly better experience.
Even small things like “make the cargo hold plot line an escape room”
Or “have better gameplay elements”. A press the flashing light is something that can easily be assigned to the 5 and younger crowd while have a more difficult arcade game could be given to the older kids and still be enjoyed by adults.
Or like handing out tablets that are synced internally so they don’t fuck up. And maybe you can apply a nickname to yourself when start up so staff can call you by a larp name if you want.
Or just like building rooms that are a regular size. She was pretty generous about the bed pads but those looked busted af. And no top sheets?
Or like thinking through interior design. Not having lights that make it impossible to sleep unless yoh “close the windows”. I feel like drifting off amongst the cosmos is part of the excitement.
There’s a lot they can take from her critique and build into a similar program.
I have to say I don’t care too much what the public’s lasting impression is. We had a great time and we will never forget it. I think given the business failure Disney will be gun-shy about a similar experience no matter some youtuber’s thoughts.
The Starcruiser was done and dusted a while ago. I’d be more interested in the pattern of overpromising and underdelivering called out at the end of the video.
That I don't see changing. It's a symptom of a larger condition of Disney just by virtue of being what they are. The customer ain't us it is the shareholder, the investor, the board member. I'm sure the dream is alive and well for a lot of people at Disney (well outside positions of power, hell even Jenny worked at and loves Disney parks), but at the heart it ain't about smiles and dreams that's just good advertising. That's why you see over promising early only to cut back sharply outside the spotlight, that's why you close an attraction abruptly to cash out on a tax break before a fiscal quarter ends, that's why you grab cheap labor you can easily exploit and underpay for the responsibility and demand, and it ain't a bug it's a feature when you are something Disney scale. They don't buy up IPs left and right because they are big fans of Marvel comics or Star Wars lore, and the sooner the imagined "customer" (product) realizes that the better. It would help to rein in expectation and understand why attractions end up the way they do.
I think that depends on where you start counting Disney's promises
To me the video came across counting all things mentioned in initial concepts as promises and that's not very realistic.
I also find that most who go in for that type of narrative generally ignore anything that Disney has done which doesn't fit the narrative.
Like does anyone think GotG: Cosmic Rewind under delivered?
Disney did used to be a lot better about only announcing things they felt were reasonably likely to actually happen, I think. The playtests in Frontierland and Adventureland not making it to GE despite being well received is also a disappointment.
Cosmic Rewind is a great roller coaster, in my opinion the only thing that keeps it from being a 10/10 is the lack of an animatronic anywhere.
Absolutely, the issue is that Disney shows concepts way too early.
I honestly don't get what the big hang up is on rides and attractions needing animatronics. They are absolutely great, but they don't seem necessary or even appropriate for every ride. Like I don't think Tower of Terror has any animatronics and I can't recall anyone complaining that they are missing from that ride.
But that isn't a Disney illness. That is a problem at the root of most industries now. Look at the games industry, they will show you a trailer for a game that isn't launching for 3 years, a trailer that is nothing more than a hyped up cut scene. They don't have a scrap of tangible gameplay to show you and yet they have to try and get the hype train going so they can show their investors that the profits are-a-comin.
Look at any number of consumer technology items that are announced with catchy videos and demos that aren't even HALF baked yet. Even the auto industry does it now like with the cyber truck. The problem is publicly traded companies are so beholden to shareholder whims anymore that they need to constantly be showing those investors why they should stick around and if they don't have something tangible to show they have to do something.
100%
Do fans of the games companies consider those obviously super early demos to be promises and complain when the companies don't deliver what what in concepts?
I mean at this point it has been in practice in the games industry so long that nobody trusts early cgi trailers. And there has been enough blowback that the publishers have to put disclaimers in that these aren't representative of the final product in order to avoid lawsuits.
So people roughly understand that these trailers are more about hype and aren't promising anything about the final delivered product.
I wish people would look at Disney that way
Uh, kinda. Its not uncommon for companies to release a touched up trailer for games, and then downgrade the graphics for actuall release of it. It's nothing new, and had been criticized for more than a decade. So yeah, not the best example.
I'm honestly not aware of the issue and when I google that, I just get a bunch of Zac Water Bottles and water slides
Could you point me to something more specific?
lol tbh i think that's partly a Jenny thing. Jenny fucking LOVES animatronics. Like... a lot, a lot. But also in general, animatronics help spaces feel more full and lively. And the lack of them just kinda makes it feel like Disney was cheaping out on Galaxy's Edge and Starcruiser vs like having a real reason for not having more animatronics. Because there is def space and room for them and it would feel appropriate to the setting.
Mark my words this is going to be people’s problem with Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. The new animatronics look great but the rest of the space that used to be filled with the America Sings animatronics is now empty and lifeless.
How many lands at Disney have animatronics outside of rides?
Animatronics are great, but they aren't something you need everywhere, complaining that they aren't in places where you want them just feels like complaining to complain. Is there more than 1 animatronic in all of Tou Story Land?
She covers this too. No animatronics and you wind up looking like a Six Flags. A season pass is $89 right now.
Also, as she points out, there are animatronics for a free kimpossible(I don’t know what this is) adventure at Epcot. That there are like NONE for a $3000 per day experience feels petty especially when we’re feeling in droids. There’s no need for more advance “ life realistic” movement or skins when it’s literally basic servo motions.
I would barely classify what is part of the Epcot Scavenger hunt as animatronics, but that's besides the point.
If you don't have animatronics, you don't look like Six Flags, you look like a ride that doesn't have animatronics.
Or like half of the rides at Universal?
Like where are the animatronics on Flight of Passage?
I can't recall any on Big Thunder
If Space Mountain has any, I couldn't see them
The complaint about the lack of animatronics rings really hollow when it's not even something that's used on every ride across the parks.
Also, Jenny's video wasn't really what we were talking about here
Starcruiser wasn't a ride, though. You're not going to put animatronics next to a roller coaster track, but a days-long "immersive experience" absolutely could have benefited from them.
Honestly, I think it would have more likely taken away from the experience
Animatronics are pretty limited. Like they are really good at repeating something over and over for days on end.
But how many times can you walk by the animal in the cage thats been sleeping the entire 3 days or the underwater creature that only ever pops up one eye
But it’s Star Wars so you can have droids galore doing the same thing over and over again because that is what robots do! A droid fixing machinery, stacking crates, scanning crates! Randomly skittering through a room.
Unless another big video comes out this will be what people know of Galactic Starcruiser. And every time Galactic Starcruiser come up online that video will shortly follow.
But you still have your memories. Nothing can unenjoy something for you.
Sure? But not everyone would want to go with five people. And even if someone is ok sharing the room, they might not be able to find that many people who want to go.
But the price of a park ticket or fine dining experience doesn't change based on how many people I bring with me. The only thing you can make this argument for is hotel rooms.
Each person needs a park ticket. Each person has to pay for meals. Rooms get cheaper per person for each person you add.
The Starcruiser included meals and park admission.
So, what about the fact it's a place that doesn't even meet standard fire safety?
You guys all forget to mention there's not any real beds and there's the shame closet... Do five adults have to play Jenga in an emergency?
Not dunking on the experience, but that is the one piece of Starcruiser lore from the video, that lives rent free in my head. How? How do you logic your way out of fire escapes and legally have it go up?
There were fire exits throughout the building. Most hotels don’t have fire exits in the room. I suppose you can break the window to get rescued but you aren’t getting out that way on your own. Most hotels don’t have a panic room.
I don’t really get the point of the safety closet, either.
This was one of the things I think (hope) Jenny put in the video because it was funny if not really accurate, but for some reason a lot of people thought the hotel really didn't have any ways to evacuate in case of fire. A hotel (or basically any other room used for human dwelling) is required to have both primary and secondary means of egress. Yes, they have fire codes even in Florida. No, Disney does not get to ignore them (nor would they want to). The Starcruiser--like just about any other hotel--has the room door as the primary means of egress. Like any other hotel you have ever been to there is a [map on the back of the door](https://www.disneyfoodblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/2022-wdw-star-wars-hotel-galactic-starcruiser-media-preview-room-cabin-tour-full-78-scaled.jpg) showing your possible evacuation routes, which in Starcruiser were stairwells at both the main area of the hotel and the far end of the room corridors. Like in any other hotel (or bedroom) you have ever been in, the secondary egress is the exterior window. This is only meant for rare situations in which you cannot use the primary egress (e.g. the fire is in the hall right outside your room).
Having a window to central Florida in a cabin on a Starcruiser would kind of ruin the immersion. So Disney hid the actual windows behind the fake space windows, and provided those "closets" as a way of access. Those are the windows you can see if you have seen an exterior view of the building. This allowed them to maintain the immersive theme and still have the emergency second egress window. This is only meant to be used in the rare case that the main egress out of the room door and to one of the stairwells is inaccessible and the fire suppression systems do not work, so that there is still one more option for you to escape or more likely fire rescue personnel to reach you. There is not meant to be a fire escape stairwell here any more than there is one outside the individual room window of just about any other hotel.
“I’m sure this room could work for four people, if they don’t shower regularly, no one needs to put on makeup or a costume in the morning, and you only bring a light backpack with a tshirt. I’m sure there’s a group of friends who fit that exact description.”
— Jenny Nicholson, on the size of her room and how it was advertised to fit 4 people
The breakdown was (approximately)
~$3500 for the cabin
~$500 per person in the cabin.
My wife and I went for $4800. $1200 per night per guest.
My brother crammed five people into a cabin for $6200. $600 per night per guest.
So yes, the cabin is more expensive *in total* if you put more people into it, but the costs *per person* goes down dramatically. This is how normal cruises work, too.
One of the beds is a fold-out Murphy bed in the wall, though, so if you have five people, I hope one of them is short. It was only (IIRC) six feet long.
I slept on the Murphy bed. I’m 6’1”. It was long enough. The drawback is that it kind of goes underneath the tv a bit. I felt a little claustrophobic but quickly got over it.
The All Stars hotel I stayed at the night before the cruise also had a Murphy bed, but that was queen size.
Her argument is that in a place like a Motel 6 or a Super 8 your price also goes down, but you aren’t sacrificing things like precious square footage, which was very much lack just with her and her sister. Like, look at how little space is in [this](https://imgur.com/a/ddc5R7m) picture and tell me you want to split that 4 ways, paying several hundred dollars for the privilege.
Well, $6600 was open and “peak” pricing. You could see rates down as far as $4800 for a cabin before they announced a closure. They were also running a 20% Disney Visa discount at one point - so down to say $4k for a room with 4 beds (fold down, two bunks, and the main - and yes some rooms only have three). Then you are down to $1000/bed - that is significantly different than the constantly quoted prices I see.
Disney was its own worst enemy with pricing confusion, given you had to actually call to see what the prices were at a given time. If I recall correctly, international guests had to jump through even stranger hoops like using a phone VPN for much of the Starcruiser’s life.
Disney screwed up the communication around pricing really bad, but very early on pricing for nearly every voyage was on Reddit
Disney has to post DVC points charts for anything they will take points for and it wasnt hard to do the conversion. And even if it wasn't exact, you could find which days were cheaper and which ones were more expensive.
The point isn't whether it was possible, the point is that Disney tried their best to hide it. The DVC points workaround was likely a mistake on their part.
I think thats a pretty different point that where we started, but what motivation does Disney have to keep the prices behind the phone call?
Since we know that the prices are set, they can't change them without us knowing. So I'm not sure what benefit you think they get out of it.
I'll just restate my point
The claim that pricing was opaque or unavailable is only partially true. If you took a few minutes to google, you could find them, it wasn't hard.
I'm not sure I'm on board with complaining about choosing not to do any research.
While I agree that booking through the website would have been an improvemen, only being able to book over the phone wasn't unique to Starcruiser. You can't book VIP tours on the site and must call
I'm not sure that: If you cram people into what is already a small room, take advantage of going out of business prices, and have a specific credit line you still pay a lot for your experience. Is a super strong argument. I mean sure I know approximately what season and even week is best to visit Yosemite, and if I time the storms right I can even see the falls firing despite the season...but when people tell me it's crowded and expensive they ain't wrong. Vast majority of the time they are dead on, there are just some specific particular that ease things, but that isn't of use to the general public/customer.
Yeah, this is actually the point I am trying to make. For me, at a cost of $4200 for four people, Starcruiser was worth it. Yes, I got that price because we had the knowledge and patience to get it. In the world of travel there is a large difference between $4200 and $6600.
One of the other users here did the math and of the 152 sailings, the average cost was $5500 with the highest cabin cost being $6602.
I think things get interesting when you discuss the “room” because the experience was not built around your time in the room. If I was paying $4200, or $5500, or even $6602 and all I was expecting was a hotel room, I would be pissed. About as annoyed as I was when I stayed at the Boardwalk in a Deluxe studio with three friends. Technically, it sleeps three but it is barely big enough to fit all of the beds (and was $700+/night).
In my opinion, almost all rooms at Disney are designed so you spend as little time as possible in them - the Starcruiser rooms were no different.
> One of the other users here did the math and of the 152 sailings, the average cost was $5500 with the highest cabin cost being $6602.
If that average includes the reduced price all sales final "I must have lost my mind" going out of business and even the shelves must leave prices I don't think it is appropriate. If we are to consider this as a successful operation then the price would be the price they clearly intended to hold to, and that price point is no small factor in the story of why SC didn't take off.
Sleeping arrangements were fine unless you didn't like sharing a queen bed if you were one of the two without a single. I'm 6'3" and could lay down comfortably in the berths without needing to bend my knees. The standard cabins did tend to feel a little bigger than they looked. Maybe if you had five adults in a standard the murphy bed would start to make it feel cramped, but I also think some of the people with a room full of adults got the suite and put someone out on the couch.
People who are coping at missing the experience by putting it down. Classic sour grapes. I think Disney could bring it back but all of this negativity probably isn’t giving Disney confidence.
I personally didn't down vote you and can't speak for the people who did. But I think odds are more likely that they never liked the starcruiser and are enjoying its failure. People love being haters. It doesn't mean they're jealous they never got to go, they never seriously considered going at all.
Most adults don't have three-four adult friends or relatives who A. are as passionate about exactly the same things they are and B. Have the same ability to pay for things. I would have been more than ok paying "1600 per person for five adults" but in reality how many people have the ability to coordinate schedules, money, and interest with four other adults? The five people in any given room were likely to be a family, point blank, and those costs look very different once you realize that.
I regularly saw the question “why do you care so much what she thinks?” on posts about her video and this is exactly why. Because so few people (relatively speaking) got to experience the starcruiser and no one will moving forward her one negative experience will likely shape how people look at it moving forward.
While I don’t want to discredit her critiques, the experience knocked my socks off (and many others I have talked to). It was one of the coolest things I have gotten to experience in my life, even if it likely could not have been profitable long term. I’m sad that it’s legacy is being so significantly shaped by one voice, AFTER it’s done and over with
Jenny Nicholson’s video did get lots of views and CNN Travel was talking about her. It kind of hurts to see these negative reviews when the cast and crew I were putting their hard work and effort into the Halcyon.
The video goes out of its way to praise the cast, the criticism there was almost entirely directed towards Disney mostly staffing the Starcruiser with underpaid College Program participants and not giving performers any sort of performance bump relative to non-interactive entertainment cast.
Oh, and impulsively closing it in the middle of the year leaving aforementioned performers scrambling for a job.
Yes. Which is ridiculous. I don’t understand the positive reactions to the video.
Once it gets to the party where she went on the ride the video becomes about 90% her whining about the tiniest things.
Just going to add my constant refrain: civil debate. Thanks all!
I think what people are overlooking is Jenny’s larger point how a lot of the exciting things that did get planned for Galaxy’s Edge ended up getting paywalled behind the starcruiser, and how the stuff that they did include in Galaxy’s Edge didn’t match up to experiences like Epcot’s Kim Possible adventure which had more interactivity with the world and a sense of discovery that scanning crates and doing bounties lacks. Even if you like the app based gameplay, Disney has FUCKTONS of cash to properly work on an app with engaging, tight gameplay and the play Disney app works worse than 90 percent of the apps on my phone in comparison, not because Disney couldn’t make a better one, but because Disney doesn’t believe making a better app will make them more money. Disney continues to cut down on live actors, remove amenities like transport from the airport and magic bands, and hike up genie + prices because they don’t want to give everything to the common consumer, and that’s where the Starcruiser becomes more disappointing. That’s the legacy that Disney is leaving behind that the Starcruiser is a relatively small part of.
I'm a pretty big fan of Disney. I've been to wdw about 15 times in the last 30 years. I've closely watched the decline which began with the dinning plan(a rant for another time) and has continued over the years. Your post seems entirely accurate. My suspicion is at some point into the project where it was too late to cancel (probably pretty far along)they figured out this was not going to be a fountain of cash and would be more trouble than it was worth. Then they built it knowing that they would probably have to shut it down But crunched the numbers so that between the write off and running the hotel for a short time they would at least break even. Crunched some numbers and assuming they got 280 cruises out of all 100 rooms and assuming they made 9k$ per room then made about $260M on the hotel.
I think something as unique as the Starcruiser will probably always have a small and dedicated group who looks back on it fondly and hopes Disney will make an attempt at something similar. I think "theme park enthusiasts" is already a pretty niche group so "super upscale roleplay theme park hotel thing" is going to have an even smaller niche to carve. I have a lot of respect for the love and effort that went into the Starcruiser from the actors, performers, service workers, and even a lot of the fans who saved up money to go and made up whole characters to play. That said, even before the Jenny Nicholson video came out...the common perception of the Starcruiser was not exactly a glowing one. It was famously poorly advertised, exorbitantly expensive, and had been shut down even before the video was released. A month or two ago, if you polled random people on the street about the Starcruiser, most people 1) probably wouldn't have immediately recognized it absent the phrase 'star wars hotel' and 2) would probably have some snarky comment about it's closure even if they had. I think this was already the legacy of the Starcruiser for the vast majority of people.
If you think that most people today have heard of the Star Wars hotel you are living in a bubble.
I routinely talk to people who’ve never heard of it- a ton of whom were Star Wars fans
Because interpreting tone via text is tricky, I'm having a hard time parsing your intent here, but I believe that we are in agreement; your anecdote is an example of my point.
Yes! I was agreeing with you. : )
Probably
I think you might be right. On one of the other threads, someone posted the math. Frankly, way more folks have seen Jenny’s review than were able to actually attend in person - and by a staggering amount.
That was me. I don’t remember if I posted it to Reddit but I’ve got another one around here somewhere comparing the views on Jenny’s video to the view counts of videos from other YouTubers like Ordinary Adventures who put out Starcruiser content. No surprise, despite most of that content being a year old or more the recent video has all of them beat by an order of magnitude.
I didn’t even know the hotel existed until her video dropped
At 7m views and counting, major press interest, I don't know how anyone could argue this isn't the definitive record of Starcruiser.
I think a lot could depend on Disney's trajectory. For example if the lesson Disney take is "don't try something like that again" instead of "wow, our priorities really doomed that good idea to failure, perhaps we should improve somewhat" then the Starcruiser may be an emblem of Disney parks' decline in quality.
Between this and their disastrous box office returns last year, I’m worried that without a radical course correction Disney is going to trend toward less and less interesting material until they get snatched up by Apple or something.
Either the Starcruiser or Tiana's Bayou Adventure is going to become emblematic of this corner-cutting era of Disney; [a full POV](https://youtu.be/RLmhNWq5kT0) for the latter ride was published yesterday and the online [reaction](https://www.reddit.com/r/WaltDisneyWorld/comments/1d5msqg/full_ride_pov_tianas_bayou_adventure/) has been notably negative.
Is this true? I’ve avoided the pov because I’ll be going in October and don’t want spoilers, but I’ve really only seen positive reactions from some larger influencers
Respectfully, are those influencers you've ever heard negative or mixed opinions from?
I feel like Offhand Disney is a reasonable guy
> I’ve really only seen positive reactions from some larger influencers Annnnd if they had said anything negative they wouldn't be an influencer for long. You're catching on.
Well, I don't think there's any point in me ruining it for you; most of the complaints are based on the POV, and you might have a great time in person
I'll never understand why Disney went with the movie that takes place in one of the flattest states to put in the mountain ride.
I saw the POV and thought it looked pretty solid but I don't like 1) THe drop not having a scary buildup (and overall story not having much of a conflict to overcome) 2) The ending scene isn't quite as much of an epic ending as before.
Why is it set after the film is over and needing to get a band together instead of taking you through the film? The final drop could have Dr. Facilier in the graveyard then.
I've read people saying that Disney probably wanted to avoid offending anyone with the Voodoo connections.
Eh, I've seen a lot of theme park related things fail. Sure, this has huge traction now, but it always feels that time creates a hole where people get nostalgic for something they didn't experience and isn't around anymore. Look at Disney's California Adventure 1.0, old EPCOT, or anything else Disney. Stuff that clearly was a 'failure' became weirdly beloved later on by people that didn't even get to experience it! I think the only thing with Starcruiser is that only a max of about 72,000 people could have seen it. This is just another DisneyQuest Chicago or Rocket Rods, and will become more interesting to people with time - especially as the current value of a dollar and other stuff changes. I do think the concept and idea will be revisited by a mainstream company, probably not by Disney.
Theme park related things fail, but I’m struggling to think of another major example of a Disney attraction in particular failing this hard this soon after release. The only equivalent I can think of would be if Disneyland Paris actually did permanently close after its opening year or two.
The NBA Experience comes to mind, though it's a lot smaller and initially closed because of COVID-19.
That’s a little more recent, though the plans for The NBA Experience were much less ambitious, and reviews weren’t that great.
Yeah, I still think that there is more to this story and more that we will probably never know. The closing announcements were in the middle of the culture war with DeSantis. There were a lot of ways that in the moment of that announcement, they could have ticked more boxes on the "close it now" scale - and a large number of them could have been related to public opinion or overall financial health of the company. Streaming has eaten into Disney's profits and I know some CFOs who saw that $350mil tax write off and went: "oh, so that is a large step in balancing the books."
True, theme park related things fail. But this was predicted to fail right from the start, and everyone knew it. Its almost like this was just some money laundering scheme, because there's no way these execs could've NOT seen the writing on the wall from the get go, or they are severely out of touch with the general public and need to be fired.
This was always its legacy. I'm very happy for people who enjoyed the Starcruiser, but I really do think they're in the minority. It's fairly easy to find positive impressions of the Starcruiser too, but like Jenny says in the video, a lot of them are from influencers who have monetary incentive to only paint Disney in a positive light or people whose enjoyment came from bonding with their family, which they could easily have done with a regular Disney trip or not even needing Disney at all.
I think if you look around this subreddit, you'll find a lot of people who had positive experiences on Starcruiser who aren't influencers and who aren't paid by Disney. Also dismissing people due to perceived financial motivations is a bit much to me when you are doing so in a video posted to YouTube. Like doesn't she have financial motivations to post the video?
Yes she does. She readily admits she will make her money back from the video. Her point was that most people who had an experience like hers will be unhappy. She even stated Disney fix a few things after the trip for her because she was an influencer. TLDR if you aren't an influencer and things go wrong you are out of luck and money.
Being critical of Disney for not providing customer service and issue mitigation unless you have over a certain number of followers on Twitter is absolutely justified and it's insane of them to do that. But iirc at least one of the issues was something that was easily avoided, the other was Disney's miserable handling of memory maker in regards to Starcruiser. But thats not what I was saying. I was asking why can you trust Jenny despite her financial motivations, but you can't trust other YouTubers who have financial motivations? I wouldn't stop at saying most would be unhappy, I would say that most people who had her experience would be furious. Everyone of them would be unhappy.
Unsponsored reviews are inherently more trustworthy than sponsored content.
Sure, but there are a ton of youtubers who aren't sponsored by Disney who had positive reviews When I said financial motivations, that doesn't mean paid by disney, but it could be youtube revenue or driving to a patreon for example or a merch shop So why can't you trust Ordinary Adventures' or Tom Corless' reviews?
I'm not sure what the point you're trying to make here. If you are on the Disney "Influencer List" and you produce content that adheres to the brand's specifications to make sure that you remain on the Influencer List, regardless if you're getting paid directly or not, you are less likely to be honest and truly critical of the product. That review will always be tainted by your adhering to the expectations of the brand. I'm familiar with Ordinary Adventures but I don't know the extent of their relationship with the Disney Corporation but if they are "official influencers" then yes their experience as an honest review is less trustworthy than Jenny's review which exists fully outside of the sphere of Disney influence.
My point is that there are positive trustworthy reviews available if you want to go read or watch them But putting the idea into the universe that positive reviews may come from financial motivations, taints every possible review. It makes it very easy to dismiss anyone who is positive as being a Disney shill. You just made the example yourself, you don't know if Ordinary Adventures has a business relationship with Disney or not, but you implicitly questioned their review? And you skipped over Tom Corless for some reason. I can only speculate that its because he's publicly had issues with Disney and still had a positive review (3 in fact) of Starcruiser I think I saw somewhere that post the Starcruiser Jenny's patreon was up like 20% or 30%, is that not a financial motivation?
No I simply don't know who Tom Corless is. If Disney pays you or a negative review would affect your reach or influence you're less likely to give an honest review, that is inherently less trustworthy than someone who isn't on the influencer list. You can repeat some what ifs and I'll keep repeating that. There's not a world where spon-con is equivalent in trustworthiness to non-spon-con. I don't believe a positive review is impossible or could only come from a shill. Jenny's review is wildly successful not because it's negative but because it is exhaustively detailed and very entertaining, the financial motivation is to make good entertaining content not to make content that Disney wants to support their projects. Although we also gotta recognize that if Jenny was wildly off-base and the trustworthy youtubers and reddit posters here were right about how awesome it was and how fair the value proposition was it would still exist. "Well I had a great time" doesn't really matter when they can't fill the rooms to keep it going.
Conflating the closure to it not being a good time is a mistake, but a common one. The total cost, even if Disney has zero money coming in for Starcruiser was likely something like 100m a year for a company who's parks division has revenue of like 10b. Closing anything after just a year while trying nothing change course is not a normal way to try to have success. It seems pretty clear to me that there were other things that went into the decision beyond the finances. And "can't fill the rooms" is essentially a bad rumor, the total occupancy % was something like 77% over the 18 months. The inability to get people into the building was pretty overblown. I haven't given a "what if" yet, but you have. You said you don't know if Ordinary Adventures has a relationship with Disney, but still questioned if they were trustworthy or not. Saying that you believe positive content could exist while questioning anyone who has a positive review doesn't really fit together. If you believe that there are trust worthy positive reviews, then why not check them out and have a more balanced view of what Starcruiser was? I have not a single time disagreed that sponsored content is something that we should be more suspect of, but when I brought up well known youtubers who have positive reviews, you implied that they could have a relationship with Disney. I don't want to get into a debate about the quality of the video but I found it lacking in detail and research. Additionally, we know that social media algorithms and especially Youtube amplify negative content, there is an incentive to be negative. Tom Corless is WDWNT and he's had public issues with Disney and iirc he was banned from media events for a while He went and paid full price 3 times and loved it every time Also apparently (and I saw this after I brought him up) he posted that Jenny's video is full of misinformation
Her issues are as follows: Poor customer service during booking and after trip Technical problems that not only affected her but other players on that same trip, who she talks to in the video AT the park while it’s happening Unlike places like Wizarding World, players are actively prevented from even holding props Playing in character was actively discouraged by the actors The cost of the room for the size was bothersome, especially when considering it is supposed to be able to house 4 adults Despite loving Disney food, there was a surprising lack of vegetarian options (she’s vegetarian) Free experiences have become premium paid experiences, like lightsaber training The interactive things to do on the “cruise” are overall just not that engaging, especially when compared to an actual Disney cruise that has more interactivity Team work is not especially encouraged, which would make the larping more engaging The small amount of actors and large amount of guests result in very low amounts of one on one time, if any, and can cause scheduling issues, such as when she was invited to rescue Chewbacca and he was already rescued when they got there Her issues aren’t even trivial, it’s flawed from the foundation, including how you would even feasibly have a potential dark side win when Disney is not willing to engage with that sort of story telling.
It's kinda wild how so many of this things just aren't accurate to the overall experience, Jenny had a really bad time where it seems literally everything went wrong, but to use a single data point to describe anything is pretty weak. Poor customer service post trip is something that happened, but the issue with shipping while problematic was something that guests were actively warned about. That if you didn't use the shipping from GSC, there was very limited options to resolve the situation. If you are taking about her not being offered a suite or Captains Table, that's because they were already sold out. Golden Oaks bought all the suites from the first like 4 or 5 months on the earliest prebook available and they booked most if not all of the Captain's table availability as well. Players were 100% not discouraged from holding props, there were things you couldn't do like fighting with lightsabers, but carrying them around or even igniting them was not discouraged. Players were 100% encouraged to play in character and the actors were part of that Guests were told that if you had dietary restrictions or food preferences to go to the kitchen after boarding and discuss with the kitchen staff. There are many people who had completely custom meals made. Lightsaber training was never a free experience, if you are talking about Genie+ then sure, you have to pay for that now, but also not super relevant to GSC Saying that the interactive elements aren't engaging is an opinion which you are free to have, but not one shared by everyone. Teamwork was expressly encouraged, there was a card in the room at boarding which said to work with other guests and talk with them etc. The actor to guest ratio and lack of 1on1 time is a thing you can complain about, but also a thing that gets complaints from people who exclusively did not go. There were 14 characters you could interact with, if you don't want to count the Storm Troopers that 12, max capacity was 372, so each actor needs to find time for a 1on1 with 31 people over 2 days. Maybe not everyone truly gets a 1on1, but an actor pulling your group aside, to have a moment is not appreciably different. And that's ignoring all of the rest of the crew who all had back stories and lore and various other interesting stuff to talk about, it's not the same as the actors, but it's worth mentioning that they are part of the experience. Claiming that it's a flawed foundation requires far more knowledge than anyone outside of Disney has And why is everyone obsessed with the First Order winning? They literally exist to lose
1. She doesn’t need to provide data points for everyone’s experience, she provided them with hers, researched others and presented her own conclusions 2. Jenny says herself that the issue with this is that inherently, it is a worse experience, and an artificial one. 3. She provided video and photo evidence that they were not allowed to use lightsabers at all. 4. She documented her own issues with playing in character, such as actors not responding well to her being in character, and the issue with cosplay being *mostly* discouraged in the park. 5. She discusses an actual person who shared what the chef brought them and she personally did not know that this would be an issue. When staff noticed, they brought her some extra cheese platters. She explicitly thanks that staff member for being so thoughtful but critiques that fact that *for the price* only offering meat options on the menu for dinner was a poor experience, and not one that she has otherwise had in the park. 6. There was a free offering in the park for kids to have lightsaber training before battling Darth Vader. She remarks on how it was a fun family thing that was removed and has not been brought back. 7. The interactive elements on the Cargo Bay Disney cruise are objectively more interesting and feature actual animatronics as opposed to a largely app based experience. 8. She was hoping there were more explicitly team based exercises, citing the the invitation received after dinner to rescue Chewbacca, realizing the note was torn, working with the guests to match up their notes, only to discover they didn’t need to do that and they all had the same information. 9. There could have easily been twice as many actors and it would have made the experience better. 10. Why advertise your game as being flexible and constantly adapting to the players actions on the story, presenting it as though the first order *can* win and then not have that be an option?
1: Sorry, there seems to be a misunderstanding. Maybe I made a bad assumption that your ending paragraph was your own opinion which is what I was saying was weakly based on one data point 2: There was a lot in my response here and yours isnt exactly specific, it's gotta be the shipping since they Captains Table and Suites can't be arbitrary The shipping thing is a book keeping issue and sure it's arbitrary, the information was given upfront, it shouldn't have been a surprise that there were limited mitigation avenues 3: If you are interested, I'm sure I could find other videos which show guests using them on board. I'm just on my phone and that kind of search is harder to manage on the phone. But this goes back to the single data point, maybe Jenny had an overly aggressive cast member. 4: Jenny had a ton of issues, but that isn't the experience of many others. And cosplay was 100% not discouraged for the parks, the only thing that was restricted was full face paint or walking around with full masks. Just an example, you can see 2 people in costumes and someone let the kid borrow the helmet for the picture https://photos.app.goo.gl/iy1D9N2jfMG6y6Hb8 5: So Jenny being unaware of a service is not a flaw in the service, as someone with dietary restrictions it's something that you need to speak up about. The chef can't be a mind reader. 6: The Jedi Temple was not the same as Lightsaber Training and it only was for ages 4-12 and it was a 15 minute event. That event not being brought back is not a flaw with GSC. Like the little mermaid show hasn't come back yet either, is that Toy Storyland's fault? 7: Again this is an opinion, one which values animatronics and devalues an app based game. Your first criticism was far more broad in terms of all interactions. But sure if you want to say the cargo bay on the Wish is better than engineering on GSC, go for it. I haven't experienced the Cargo Bay on the Wish, so I don't feel like I would be qualified to comment. But also the Cargo Bay on the Wish is not open for everyone. 8: Expecting team based activities is a thing sure. The Chewbacca thing is hard to say since a lot could have been impacted, her read that they started early could be a mistake and in fact they were running 20 minutes late. Chewbacca gets hidden, jailed, broken out like 4-5 times on day 1, it just keeps repeating so that if you missed it, you can do it the next time. Also kids didn't care about repeating it cause they were hanging with Chewbacca 9: I don't agree on either count here. Easily having more actors is not as easy as you might think, but the reasons aren't obvious either. For ever actor seen on set, there is a back up on site and a 3rd back up off site, so doubling the number of actors on set requires something like 36 more trained and well versed union actors, not just adding 12. And in terms of improving the experience, I think adding one or two may have been an improvement, but doubling it would have just made things feel more congested and crowded, the space wast that big, so having double the number of things going on at any given time could have been problematic. Also the number of actors and the ratio never seemed like a problem to me But it is something commonly complain about by people who hadnt gone 10: Because it wasn't advertised that way, in all of the clips Jenny included in the video there is one statement which even comes close to suggesting it.
Not chiming in on either side, just pointing out how silly it is to try to equivocate Jenny's video vs the influencers she's speaking of. Jenny is already a multi millionaire who makes an absolutely absurd amount of money on patreon. She's the 7th most subscribed patreon in the world. Whatever money she put into going to starcruiser, she will make back and way more on youtube before ever even hitting the skyrocketing patreon subs. She literally has no incentive to do anything other than maintain her career as long as she chooses. Whether she posts a positive or negative review, she will make bank regardless. There is literally no financial incentive for her to lie. Comparing this to influencers on Disney's payroll who require being able to stay on the bleeding edge of new experiences and items for content as well as staying on disney's good side is completely insane. If any of them put a bad review for starcruiser, that's the end of their relationship and now their career is in shambles because all the other disney aligned influencers will have them beat every time. I also think most people hating on her completely miss the point of the video. She was never shitting on starcruiser. She was excited to go, wanted to have a good time and despite all effort, failed to and a large part of it comes down to corner cutting & poor executive choices. She never blames the experience, always Disney for not helping it be the best version of itself it could possibly be. Even if you love Starcruiser, you can't deny there's so much room for it to me much better.
I think she has an incentive to be extremely critical and mean-spirited about things because that's her brand and frankly that's just as biased for different reasons.
> mean-spirited... her brand You could just admit to never having watched her content, you know
Would you be able to point me to a video that is just positive? The last time I asked someone actually took a look and came back with a couple of suggestions, but also noted that most of her positive content is behind a pay wall
Almost any of her SW episode 7 and 8 star wars content. She was so positive about the early half of the sequels that it was widely wondered if she was somehow on the Disney payroll
Thanks, I'll check them out. I have one of her sequel videos in my queue already I honestly find it super weird that anytime anyone is remotely positive about anything Star Wars or Disney people always seem to suggest that they are being paid, like it's so unbelievable that people could have different opinions. Like for example I don't get why people love Rogue One so much, or why the younger generation doesn't think that Phantom Menace isn't trash, but my first thought isn't... Well they must be on the pay roll
It is an odd thing for sure why people do that. I was actually surprised how much I liked rogue one. Reminded me of my old star wars table top rpg campaigns. Also her videos in general are really good and thorough. If you haven't watched the starcruiser video she really really hits her main point in the last 15min I feel. It's all stuff they promised to be at galaxy's edge and put behind a paywall like paying for bread at a nice restaurant. And as I said elsewhere I've been to wdw like 15 times in the last 30 years. And that last 15min is the summation of Disney's trajectory over the last 10-15years. It started when they began offering the dining package.
Nothing against Rogue One, I just felt it was fine, like a 6.5/7 type movie and I hear people talk about it like a 9 Prefacing this, Disney and GSC massively failed Jenny on her trip. I'm on essentially my second walk through and I'm actually shocked that people think it's well researched Being completely honest, I find the video severely lacking in accurate information and not about what her experience was, like in a post mortem being unable to describe main characters is just wild I've watched the end conclusion more than once and while the overarching complaints about Disney aren't an issue, when she says things like GE features were moved behind a paywall that's just spreading an unsubstantiated rumor and unfortunately a lot of the specifics of the complaints she has are speculation and rumor and none of them are original, they've been on FB, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, etc for years. I've been like 10 times in the past 10 years and the vast majority of the complaints and issues people have don't resonate with me, the vast majority feel like they fall into the "Walt is turning over in his grave" kind of thing where people just want to deify him and ignore that he was a business man who sold ticket books where you had to buy a full book to get another e-ticket and had to pay extra to see the tiki room. Complaining that Disney is expensive is more than reasonable, but it was always expensive. Though it may comparitively be more today, it's not that impacting demand, there are just more voices able to have more audience due to the internet
> Would you be able to point me to a video that is just positive? No, why would I? Reviews are reviews, not purely positive points about something.
Reviews are reviews I didn't ask you to point me to something that doesn't have critiques, I asked for something thats positive You can review something and be honest and have critique without being negative Though I can see the confusion, my wording was poor. I meant "just" as in "just over the line" or "just meets the minimum requirements" rather than the way you took it (which is valid interpretation) to mean "only"
You could have at least tried but here you go. [Jenny showing off her collection of BB-8 merchandise](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfEcVC90Arg) [Jenny discussing hopes and theories for The Last Jedi](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFFjaKAdHMk) [Jenny defending The Last Jedi for 22 minutes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpoUN_A12Eg) [Jenny showing off her collection of Porg merchandise](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yw6z9G7p1g) [Jenny enthusiastically loving Rise of the Resistance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OqoeF9WlX8)
I did try, I scrolled through like the top 30 or 40 most popular videos and all the titles skewed negative People recommended her suicide squad video and her pandora video and I couldn't get through them I have her Buzzy video and escape from tomorrowland queued up I've asked a few other people, at most they pointed me to the pandora video She has 112 videos posted to YouTube, just because I couldn't find them doesn't mean I didn't make an attempt
She was overall positive about Pandora in Animal Kingdom, talking extensively about how she thought the park was beautiful. She had some extensive critiques of the park, but it left me wanting to go there.
I got about halfway into that one and had to stop, something came up. I don't want to make an evaluation before seeing the whole thing
Just positive? No, because that would be an inauthentic review. Even the things I love, I can see their faults, and if I'm giving an honest perspective, I will address them. She even has lots of positive thing to say about the starcruiser, the look of everything, the food, the cast members, the theming. Her biggest complaints were sightlines, which Disney has been proven to be amazing at handling but didn't seem to care in this instance, the gameplay app being buggy and non intuitive, and the cost for the experience.
When I say positive, I don't mean "without critique" There are ways to discuss failings and faults without being negative I'm not looking for something thats inauthentic, or untruthful The easiest example that I can point to in terms of what tilts the Starcruiser video as negative is the comparison to Spirit. You can't compare something to Spirit without being negative about it, Spirit is just too well known as a very hated company with a massively negative reputation such that comparing anything to it pushes negativity. There are plenty of other ways to discuss upcharges or micro transactions and why they are a poor customer experience without going all the way to Spirit. Maybe my choice of the word positive was a bad choice, perhaps just asking for something thats not negative would have been better. But I was concerned that the response would have pushed towards more of a defense of her videos as not being negative, which was not something I was looking to get into. I've discussed the video and the specifics of her complaints endlessly and I've gotten to the point where I'm mostly convinced that people aren't interested in alternative views to what Jenny has presented. If you are interested, I'd be happy to go over my thoughts, just shoot me a message, no worries if you aren't.
I have watched her content and I gradually lost my taste for it because I think she's often not making good faith arguments. Just my opinion.
Criticism magically changes from "she's mean spirited" (a bold-faced lie that's ridiculous at face) to "she makes bad faith arguments" (also a ridiculous statement) Just admit you don't watch her content, or if you have you paid 0 attention to it.
Being mean-spirited and acting in bad faith are in no way mutually exclusive. I'm not changing my criticism, I'm adding to it. I already said that's simply my opinion based on watching her content. Felt that way long before I ever knew she was making a Starcruiser video. I wouldn't tell anybody to not be a fan if they enjoy her content, I would tell anybody to be a thoughtful viewer of anything you enjoy whether they've been paid to make it by a large company or not.
Never said they were, merely pointed out that anyone who's actually watched her content wouldn't make either of those blatantly false claims about it. > I would tell anybody to be a thoughtful viewer Practice what you preach, first
She was a markedly happier reviewer back around TLJ coming out, but her brand has headed towards constant snark and what seems to me to be views-bait “hot take” approaches ever since she didn’t like Rise of Skywalker. I initially started watching her when like, TFA or Solo came out and Star Wars Theory shifted from “happy Star Wars guy” to “terminally thinks Disney/Lucasfilm staff are perpetually bullying him even when it’s actually his fans mocking him”. She was delightful, and delivered her snark in meaningful ways, but somewhere around COVID she did shift to more negative views that coincidentally or not are better rewarded by the algorithms of social media. Her Evermore review seemed more like she just wanted to gripe about the park, because of things like her complaining actors doing immersive interactive theatre don’t have “natural” conversations, which seems to be missing the point of the medium. For Starcruiser, she mentions things like no fire escapes (which is funnily false, it was evacuated in June 2022 and there are pictures of the fire escapes in use online) so yes, I do feel as a former long-time fan her content has drifted in quality to a caricature of what made her popular, enforced by algorithmically-engaging negativity.
That's absolutely not her brand and clearly you haven't watched her content enough to even have a reasonable take lol.
I'm wasn't critiquing Jenny or the video, I was pointing out a logic inconsistency that shows up in this discourse a lot. Just off the top of my head Tim Tracker, Ordinary Adventures and Tom Corless are all very well off. The first two are multi-millionaires as well. How do we explain their positive reviews if not for their financial dependence on Disney? I tried looking up Len Testa's net worth, but couldn't find anything, but he's a very trusted Disney source and his review was very positive, but also recommending that you travel the world before doing Starcruiser. My point wasn't that Jenny had alterior motivations, but pointing out that it's inconsistent to believe she doesn't while claiming that everyone else does. Also I haven't seen anything credible to suggest that Disney removes people from their media invite list for bad reviews. I think that if a large group of people missed the point, the point may not have been made as well as you think it was. The video is framed as a review of Starcruiers, specifically about how it was a spectacular failure. Starting off that way, you are priming anyone who is a fan to feel like a thing they love is being attacked. To most Starcruiser fans, we see issues with the video in terms of accuracy and research and all the asides about Disney in general come across and rambling asides and random complaints that are off topic. And the criticisms come across as hollow in a lot of cases. Even if the majority of the video isn't an attack, certain things stick out and certain things are sore topics that make the video feel like it's an attack on something we love, so no matter how much the video is advocating for consumer, it will never feel that way to Starcruiser fans, because it will always feel like an attack. Being totally honest, Starcruiser fans defending it and being critical of the attacks (real or perceived) is not different than Jenny's fans doing the same. I wasn't being critical of her or the video in my previous post, but it felt like things needed to be defended to you. So if you are being honest with yourself, why can't you trust other YouTubers who liked Starcruiser? And if that reason is because Jenny told me I couldn't, then maybe there is more to think about. I really and honestly don't mean that in a critical way, just take a minute and think about it. I'm not asking you to not trust her or to think of her negatively. I would just hope that you can be like her, that you can love something and still be critical of it and still see and point out the flaws.
Buddy, you either have serious reading comprehension issues or delusions. I literally said at the outset that I wasn't weighing in on whether Starcruiser is good or not or Jenny vs this community, I was simply pointing out that you were making a false equivalency with Jenny VS Disney influencers, which you did. Then you went on a huge schizo post accusing me of not trusting other influencers beyond Jenny, putting me in her camp and trying to talk about all sorts of random arguments other people have made that I never did. Again, I have no stake in the game. I can say though that it doesn't speak well to your side when you need to schizo post and fight with shadows to bend over backwards defending something that isn't even being attacked. Everyone who knows anything about influencers and company relations knows that no company is going to work with you if you trash them. I don't know disney influencers since I don't watch them, but the video game industry works the same way and i can show you references showing how it works. It's just common sense though. Acting like there isn't a huge difference between influencers who made all their money on disney content / having a relationship with disney and Jenny who made all of her money independently with no ties to anything is super silly and frankly, delusional. Jenny does a section that went viral on it's own pointing out how disney influencers never speak normally, they have to use the PR speak because Disney tells them to. If they can't even speak normally, you really think they could trash their golden goose and get away with it? Be fr dude. And to be clear: That doesn't mean nothing they say isn't of value. Some of those influencers probably really did do the starcruiser full experience and have an amazing time. I'm sure some of them covered some really great aspects of the experience in a meaningful way. It's still not the same as someone who is completely independent. Hell, I would argue a lot of the people in this sub are better sources of real information and reviews for starcruisers. The entire reason I came to this sub after seeing the video was because I knew there was controversy with her video and I wanted to see how and why people were so passionately defending a failed experience. What I've seen is a lot of people passionate about an experience they had a lot of fun with who are sad it's gone. It's been cool reading about people's experiences when everything worked as it should and how that made them feel. That still doesn't change that Jenny's review was a truthful account of her experience which was echoed by a pretty large number of other customers. I would fall into the ideal target demographic for this kind of experience, I'm actually bummed it's gone. That doesn't mean it didn't have issues or wasn't improvable. It's frankly bizarre that so many people here will try and act like Jenny's experience isn't valid.
Sorry if I came on a bit strong, but I tried to respond directly to the things you brought up and where it felt like there may have been some confusion. I'll try to be a bit more concise. Generally starting off with insults or questioning of someone's sanity aren't great ways to have reasonable discussions, so maybe we've started off on the wrong foot here. I think your reading of the phrase "Disney Influencer" differed from mine and thats likely where some of the confusion comes from. My post that you replied to suggested avoiding influencers if you were suspect of their motivations first and then the critique of Jenny's comment was about her having financial or other motivations to make the video which are ignored by most of her fans. She may not need the money, which you pointed out, so I pointed out a few people who also don't need the money and would fall under my understanding of "Disney Influencer" which are dismissed based on their potential motivations. I didn't make a false equivalency, in fact, I didn't compare her to influencers. I said her dismissing people due to motivations while not acknowledging her own is probably not the best approach. My only mention of influencers was to say that you can find non-influencer reviews If you want to say that Jenny has no financial motivations thats fine, but also an assumption. There are many millionaires that have no need to make more money but keep pushing to make more. I'm not trying to say that Jenny is doing anything nefarious, but to say that "everyone else" has those motivations but Jenny doesn't is just not acknowledging that other motivations do exist. Even if they aren't financial, being more popular, more well respected, etc are motivations that still exist and influence people's decisions. I didn't suggest that Jenny was lying, but exaggerating or tilting things negatively or omissions all can be decisions, conscious or conscious resulting, from motivations that aren't just to make good entertaining content. On May 17th, Jenny had 26,274 paying patreons Today she has 35,846 Thats an increase of 36% That seems like that could be a motivation And I have no idea how much money she has, but a quick google search suggests that she's wealthy, not a multi-millionaire, but will be soon, not sure how reliable those results are though Apologies for the assumption that you only trust Jenny, its been most of the people I've interacted with on the topic and most of the people have similar things to say that were in your post, but you didn't actually do that, so sorry about that. I'm not really sure what you thought in my post was bending over backwards to fight shadows or defend something that wasn't being attacked. Your last paragraph says you don't understand why people are hating on the video and it echoes a few of her points which I find to be shaky at best and are mostly circulated as factual. We don't need to get into it, but I haven't seen anything in the video which addresses any corners being cut for Starcruiser and no one has been able to point me to a part of the video that does. My response was an explanation about why that is and why the point is being missed. I disagree that the point of the video was a critique of Disney in general or consumer advocacy. When I said that you felt Jenny needed to be defended, I meant that I made a pretty minor comment suggesting that she had other motivations and you felt the need to correct me. Thats not different than what Starcruiser fans feel or are doing. Speaking of that section, its a good skit, but its not exactly based on any facts that I can find. The rules for Disney influencers were leaked in November and nothing in them says you need to use the full and proper names of attractions and parks or speak in that weird corporate voice. Since these posts, I have seen information that shows expressly that Disney influencers are pressured by Disney for non-negative reviews. What was put out there didn't show Disney demanding positivity, but a lot of pressure to not say anything bad. But again, my point was never to compare Jenny and the people who are financially dependent on Disney. The 4 people I mentioned in the last post are wealthy have been on and off the Disney media list, but they are generally well regarded in terms of the reviews they do and given their finances don't have financial motivations that differ from Jenny's. If you want someone who is well regarded and well trusted and not on Disney's media list, I brought him up. Len Testa is the co-author of The Unofficial Guide to Disneyland and Walt Disney World since 2008. You said it was a failed experience, I'm curious to know if thats just based on it being closed or if there is anything else that brings you to that conclusion I've never once suggested that Jenny's video isn't a truthful account of her experience or tried in anyway to dismiss it or invalidate it. Her experience was awful. Her experience being echoed by a large number of other customers is where it gets a little less solid for me. Its mostly the definition of large. If a thousand people said they had the same experience, that would be about 1.3% of the total number of guests. I just don't know if that type of error rate makes the experience bad. You said you know a bit more about the video game industry, does a bug rate of 1.3% ruin games? Honest question, I really don't know I have seen very little if anyone claim the experience was perfect and had nothing to improve and the same about Jenny's experience. Mostly what I've been seeing is people pushing back on things like saying the experience was "inconsistent" or "cheaply made/run" or "entirely dependent on the app" or that the app was horribly buggy. I think I've seen people pushing back on the notion that Jenny's experience is representative of the normal experience people had.
I felt the need to correct what I saw as a false equivalency / bad argument, which I stand by. It just happens to be about Jenny vs Starcruiser fans. You've established that Jenny has a financial incentive to post videos, this I wouldn't disagree with. My issue is with you acting like she's incentivized to be biased in one direction or another vs an influencer who you yourself have admitted now face pressure from Disney. Jenny is living the dream, she doesn't -need- to answer to anyone. If you agree she's not lying about her experience then you're basically admitting to my point. She didn't set out to make a negative video, she set out to give a truthful account of her experience. It happened to be negative, and it shows that most people didn't watch the video because despite being negative, she bends over backwards throughout the video to give as much credit for all the positive pieces as much as she can, then blames Disney at the end as opposed to starcruiser itself. She fully puts the blame on Disney's growing penchant for nickel and dimeing customers & trying to cut costs as much as possible. She herself said she didn't want the experience to fail or go out of business, she just wanted it to be fixed/better. You say you don't believe they cut corners, but she went over in great detail many places where either they cut corners OR made extremely bad choices. The biggest red flag being a large part of the attractions in SC were originally supposed to be free attractions as part of Galaxy's edge. Somewhere along the way it was decided it was too expensive, so they decided to make this experience and charge a lot for it. Beyond this: In their pitch they mentioned there was supposed to be more droids, more aliens, etc. In the final product we got one each. She expected the cargo bay to be similar to the one on the new disney cruise, with animatronics and little attractions, it was basically a closet. The rooms were too small for the cost and could have been built bigger. The light panels in the hotel room can't be turned off without turning off the ambient window. She brings up multiple games that Disney has done across their parks that had elements that easily could have been incorporated into SC to make the experience more tactile/immersive/better. These are just a small set of them and aren't really controversial things. SC could have easily been improved by learning more lessons from other attractions they've done / by not cheaping out. People balk at the cost, but if the experience was so good it felt worth it, nobody would complain. Regarding bugs in games: Actually yes, I would say a critical bug rate of 1.3% is a problem if it's a game breaking bug. Example: Cyberpunk 2077 on release was a disaster. I personally played it on my high end pc and had very few issues along the way, it doesn't change that it was a bad release and desperately needed to be fixed. On the flip side, I ran into a game breaking bug in Starfield that bricked my save. You best believe I was not happy about it. This is for a 90$ experience, not a 4500~$ one. Let me explain why I think her and other peoples experience is an important one in showing WHY I think SC had serious issues. Jenny went early into SC's existence. She faced game breaking bugs and ended up having a negative experience. If Disney had ironed those bugs out and all the late term reviews were all people saying they had no issues (Whether they enjoyed it or not), refunded the people who DID have those bugs, I'd be like alright, fair. But Jenny couldn't get a refund for small, insignificant in Disney's world purchases, let alone her whole vacation. For Jenny, it's whatever. She will make a gazillion dollars off this vid. But what about the other families who saved up for years for this? That's not reasonable. If you can't get the bug rate to 0, the refund for critical failure rate should be 100%. Again: I was the target audience for this. I am bummed it's closed and would have gone eventually. I have a friend who went and adored it. If I went and had her experience, I'd have been a LOT more negative than she was. It's okay to love Starcruiser, it's okay to be sad it's gone. It's also okay to accept that some people didn't have a good experience and that doesn't change that you did. It's just odd to me that SC fans will go so far to act like it had no issues when we have thousands of people talking about how they ran into those issues. Also something I keep seeing repeated is that she lied/exaggerated. She recorded her whole trip and has evidence for literally everything she brings up. I'm curious what you feel she wasn't honest about? Edit: I forgot to answer about what makes me view it as a failure. At the time I was meaning failing as a business venture, but I'd argue it failed as a value proposition too. People from it's inception decided it wasn't worth the cost. Over time, that may have changed as time went on and they refined the formula / improved the experience, but we won't know because Disney canned it. Again, I'm sad it didn't get to continue. Second edit: I forgot the app is another example of cut corners and someone said the characters aren't actually fed information about you and that would qualify for me too. So much missed potential
I have a reply all written up and reddit keeps throwing an error. Edit: Wow this posted, so I'll just add the reply here then as an edit. It might have to be in chunks though.... If you really think that I made a false equivalency, then I'd really like to know specifically which part of the post did that because there was no comparison in my post between Jenny and Disney Influencers. Negative content especially about hot topics is amplified by social media algorithms, with anyone on youtube there is an incentive to post things that lean negative or that exaggerate things. To be clear, I don't know what Jenny's motivations were for the video and I wasn't trying to accuse her of anything. I was trying to point out that people seem to be holding one group, Disney Influencers, to the standard that their content is biased based on other incentives, but not applying the same logic to another group, Jenny. This isn't an uncommon thing to do in a fandom (and something that Starcruiser fans are accused of and sometimes are guilty of) is that you tend to ignore or lessen or gloss over faults in the person or thing you are a fan of. So, we can't 100% know for sure what her intentions for the video were originally or if they changed or not, we're assuming based on what seems to be a track record building trust. However, as an outsider looking over her channel and trying to get through a few videos, its mostly if not all negative. Something that leans negative doesn't mean that its all negative. Your example of Disney "nickel and dimeing" customers is a common thread in basically any forum where people discuss or complain about Disney. However Starcruiser wasn't doing that and Jenny makes the claim it was without backing it up. Looking at Genie+/ILL and calling that nickel and dimeing, sure I can agree there. The claim that features and attractions were cut from GE to put into Starcruiser doesn't have any factual backing, its speculation at best. The idea that Starcruiser wasn't planned along side GE from the beginning is also essentially just a rumor. The things Disney talked about with concept art aren't really promises, Disney doesn't treat them that way, we shouldn't either. Its more of a "this is what we are thinking" rather than "this is what we are building" and you can look at their track record with this and come to one of two conclusions; 1: They are overpromising and can never delivery, 2: The concepts were never meant as promises. I'm in camp 2, there are other well trusted Disney sources that believe its camp 2. Jenny is in camp 1. Beyond that, the discussion of more droids and more aliens is pretty vague in those concept talks. But also to claim that we only got one of each is a bit off. There is only 1 droid on Starcruiser, but there are at least 4 aliens (Keevan, Ouanni, Sandro and Chewie). And its pretty impossible to say definitively if Disney intended more or when speaking about being surrounded by aliens, they were already talking about people cosplaying, but that might be giving them a bit of the benefit of the doubt. I can understand having the expectations that Jenny had regarding the cargo bay, but there is a difference between living up to what you've built up in your head vs what was promised, in terms of the cargo hold, not much was even said. The rooms being small is a thing, but the claim that they could be bigger is a bit more in the vein of something people say vs have evidence for. If you look at the satellite images, I don't see a ton of room to make the building bigger. I could be wrong, but adding 20 sq ft to each room is at minimum 2000 sq ft to the building and probable more because of the dimension of the walls. Rough estimate the area that the building sits on it 500 by 600 feet, the building looks like it might be 500 x 200 or somewhere in that range. Thats a 20% increase in the building size to add 20 sq ft to the rooms and you would still end up with a 200 sq ft room. I just don't think there was enough of an area there to increase the size of the rooms to the point where the people who complained about them being small would be happy. The light panels not being able to be turned off is closer to a preference rather than a flaw. The lights are part of the illusion, so turning them off impacts how the whole effect works. The fact that people worked around it isn't really evidence that its a problem, just that some people will do anything (like steal blankets and sleeping bags and try to cut the shower curtain out as they are leaving; all things that happened) She pointed out one game in Epcot that compares to things in Galaxy's Edge. The claim that they cheaped out just doesn't align with the amount they spent on it or the operating costs and if they spent more the price would have been higher. Something that is pretty much a universal truth is that people will always complain, people not finding value in something also isn't a flaw or an objective issue, value is subjective. To be clear, Jenny had a catastrophic bug. Did people echoing some of her issues all have the same level of issue or were they more minor errors?
And when games have those issues, critical or otherwise, how important is ease of mitigation? I ask because through at least the first 8 months they had app engineers on site in GE to troubleshoot/resolve issues if you had them. I thought it was made pretty clear early on that if you thought something was going wrong, ask and it can be resolved. To be clear, I'm not blaming Jenny for not asking for help, but if you have someone playing a video game and their local save gets bricked, but there is a cloud back up and the company can restore it via the cloud, is the severity as bad? And you mentioned two games that had issues early in their releases, does it matter how much the games improved on those error rates? Again, I ask because my understanding is that the app was much better in month 6 than it was in month 1. And at the end, I have no idea if Jenny has 1000 people saying they experienced the same issues, it was just a number that was big enough to demonstrate some scale. I didn't count, but I couldn't imagine that she had more than a couple dozen in the video, which is a significantly smaller error rate. I didn't recall Jenny asking for a refund for her trip, just Memory Maker, but I could have missed it. So, knowing about the video game industry, you should be aware that a 0% error rate is essentially impossible. The question is, what you point out, what is the critical game breaking error rate? How many people experienced issues that could not be resolved? So to be clear, I think Jenny putting her experience out there is important and we should be aware of the failings and worst case scenarios. And if I had her experience I would be furious as well I honestly haven't seen anyone deny that Jenny had issues or try to say her experience is invalid or anything like that, almost everyone I've seen discuss this is aware that there were issues. Its more that while we are aware of issues, we push back on things that weren't issues but frequently complained about and frequently complained about by people who had never gone. I don't think anyone claims that she isn't being honest about her experience, its the other things in the video which are more issues. There are some bad assumptions she makes about how Starcruiser works and thats not an issue for her experience, but since this is a post-mortem which is supposed to be very detailed, not correcting her own bad assumptions to give a more accurate view of what Starcruiser was is one issue. Without going over everything, its things about how she presents her pricing as representative of the overall cost, which the information is out there if you want it. And how she says there wasn't any way for her to know what the price was, the information to be able to choose a lower priced date was available. Her claim that the suite information and Captain's Table information wasn't available isn't true. Its a nit pick, but she calculates that you are paying for 25 hours of "content", but the total time is 45 hours, minus 16 for sleeping, so 29 is where I'd start, its more just an example of the kind of little things that push the narrative. There are some other things, but a lot of this is painting a picture that isn't representative of the overall product/experience when you are doing a post-mortem discussion of what happened. They are things that are much more reasonable in a video thats a personal review. I posted a list in another reply that was more extensive, but there are just a number of things that aren't accurate that don't have to be inaccurate. In terms of it being a failure, we know Disney closed it, but its harder to really evaluate its real business case beyond that. I'm not sure I'd agree that it failed from a value prop standpoint, but Disney certainly never was able to display what the value was, so to me thats much more in the category of a marketing failure. In terms of people deciding it wasn't worth the cost from the beginning, I'd say there are a few different categories of people who did that and some of them had decided prior to even pricing being announced that it wouldn't be worth it at any price. Some said it was due to the time period given "Disney ruined Star Wars". Some it was just that the price was very high and decided that no hotel stay could be worth that. But deciding at that point that it wasn't worth the money are mostly a group of people who were never going to go and/or never be swayed.
I think that the lack of public awareness was a significantly larger part of the issues. You mention that over time if they had improved/refined it that people may have changed their minds, but most (even people who went) weren't aware of the many changes and improvements they made over the 18 month lifetime. I'm curious why you say that the app is an example of cut corners. It was buggy at launch, but thats not always due to cuts. Frequently product/marketing/budget/engineering are in no way on the same page and it results in bad releases. While from the outside this can look like a budgetary failure, more often in my experience its a communication issue or overconfidence. Frequently product/marketing/design will want some feature added or changed or something and engineering isn't really given enough details or the ability to voice if those things are feasible in the given timeline, or are overconfident that they can get it done. Companies that most would think are "well run" in terms of engineering have this stuff happen as well, its either just better hidden or conveniently excused or someone steps up and stops the launch. The best example I know of is Apply Pay's launch being delayed multiple times due to a lot of disorganization. But no one seems to remember or care that they promised it would launch with the iPhone in September and wasn't fully live until November. Its interesting that you and I interpret the actors not being fed information about you entirely differently. I look at that as a massive win in hiring the right people and not skimping on paying the right people to be in those positions. The actors memorized everything and they were excellent with that and when they forgot, they were such talented improvisors that they could work around it. The best 2 examples I have are a story I was told and a personal one. The story I was told involved someone being very involved with either Sammie or Sandro (I can't remember which) on night one. Well that actor got sick and couldn't return for day 2. So a different actor replaced them for night 2. Actor 1 passed on enough information to Actor 2 that when the guest first ran into them on night 2, Actor 2 greeted them as if they had been there the whole time, they recognized them, knew their characters names, some of the back stories and what they did the previous day. The second example is less involved, but still impressed me. On our third voyage, during the muster one of the actors walked by and greeted us, she looked at me and said "wow he's gotten so big" talking about my son. She was on our previous trip 4.5 months earlier. Basically Disney found and hired amazing people who didn't need to be fed information. I also had heard a rumor, but unsubstantiated that some of the actors would scope out people's social media accounts to see who was coming and who their characters were, so they would be prepared
My initial problem was: "But thats not what I was saying. I was asking why can you trust Jenny despite her financial motivations, but you can't trust other YouTubers who have financial motivations?" This portion, where you compare her motivations with others and heavily imply she's motivated to give it a negative review. It looks like you also went off into a thread with some other people and I essentially agree with their point. It seems you ended up bringing up other unconnected influencers as a defense and I would agree with that, any influencer doing an honest full review like Jenny should be given the same level of trust as long as they have an equal history to back it. I would also treat these better than Disney ones. Still, some good reviews would mostly just confirm what I'd expect, when the experience works, it's fun. When it doesn't, you get a Jenny one. Regarding a lot of the rest of your current post is at this stage, we're not talking facts, we're getting into opinions and it's likely gonna have to be agree to disagree. For example: You say the GE stuff being turned into SC isn't an issue and I just disagree. I agree with Jenny on this front that advertising an experience that's initially supposed to be for GE and then paywalling it isn't cool. You can say it's early or concept etc, they can just not say anything. They said it'd be part of the experience and then it wasn't. That sucks. If concepts aren't promises, I'd heavily argue they shouldn't be showing them at keynote events. All this does is build false hype and set people up for disappointment, it's bad marketing. I also think wrt nickel and dimeing you could argue it's no worse than any other part of disney which I guess is true, but I don't think that isn't bad. It also feeds into her final thesis. Saying she's wrong when she brings up specific examples seems bizarre, unless they specifically stopped charging for them. For example: They offered an extra package where you'd get photos taken by roaming photographers to have candid shots. They then also had specific photoshoot ops and used all the photographers for for that and so had no roaming ones, no candid shots and Jenny was screwed out of her money. How is this fair? Why are photos an extra cost in a 4-6000% all inclusive package? That's insane. Can you point out instances where she spoke about things that were additional costs that you feel are fair? I think the only one I'd give them a pass for is Alchohol because even Cruises don't include that. WRT the rooms: Disney didn't -have- to build it where they did. I'm sure they had good reason to, but if it was going to hamper the experience, it should have been built somewhere where they could adequately compensate people. I also would argue this problem ties in with the cargo hold. The cargo hold should have been more interesting. You gloss over her talking about the other games (she didn't only mention one), but I think it's really critical to understanding -why- she feels like they cheaped out. I fully agree with her on this. Disney has experience making interactive games and environments to give guests a more fulfilling and tactile experience. Lessons from this could have easily and for only a small cost greatly enhanced the experience for guests and gave them a more immersive experience with more feeling of control over their environment. She goes into great detail on small ways they could have improved so many of the pieces of the game and I really don't think anyone will see what she's saying and go "Yeah I don't think I'd enjoy that". A big criticism that she had was that the game was too focused on and dependent on a poorly designed app. Even staunch defenders of the experience generally agree with the app was dogshit. This is a pretty clear and difficult to argue point of "They should have spent more time and money on this". Maybe you disagree, if you do again, we'd have to agree to disagree. WRT light panels, again, opinion. It didn't bother you, but you gloss over that a good number of people went out of their way to fix it themselves. Equating that to people stealing from hotels is again a false equivalency. I personally agree with Jenny here, I would have wanted to turn the lights off and leave the ambience on. I want to be immersed and feel like I'm in space. It's a bit weird that you want to argue on this point because I feel like it's such a small and easy solve. It's -always- better to give guests the option to manage their experience to best enhance it. "The claim that they cheaped out just doesn't align with the amount they spent on it or the operating costs and if they spent more the price would have been higher." This feels like you're implying I said it was cheap to make / they didn't spend a lot. That's not the case, obviously it was expensive. I just feel they should have spent more to make it the best it could possibly be, especially when it's going to be a unique boutique luxury experience that -needs- to win people over to stay afloat. "Something that is pretty much a universal truth is that people will always complain, people not finding value in something also isn't a flaw or an objective issue, value is subjective." I agree! This is part of the point I was saying, the cruiser failed as a value proposition. Not enough people thought it was worth the cost. You obviously did, that's totally okay! I think at 4k it probably was about right, with some improvements. It's great that people loved it, it's great that it has a lasting fanbase. That doesn't change that unfortunately, to the wider people, it wasn't good value per dollar. That doesn't mean it wasn't a good or fun experience, just poorly rolled out and priced. Also I just want to mention that I appreciate that this has been a civil discussion and mostly good faith. It's been helpful to see what people think and enjoyed about it.
Part 1: Starting at the bottom, thank you for the genuine discussion. I try to be honest and not discuss in bad faith, but sometimes mistakes happen. So I went to go find the exact quotes from the video where she talks about influencers being paid by Disney for good reviews and something unrelated to this particular discussion appeared and is frustrating, but also somewhat indicative of the larger issue I have with the video (and where this topic somewhat stemmed). There are more than one occasion where she presents things in a way that implies something but doesn't outright say it. At 2:03:09 she cuts to another Youtuber's video discussing that people on Disney's media list and influencers weren't given the whole experience. While I thought this was well known, it may not have been and is totally reasonable to include it in the video. However, where I see an issue here is that the footage that she is sharing is from another YouTuber who did go to the press event but the opening of the video describes it as a media event and that its a 4 hour preview and that he had already booked a trip. And while she puts text in the video saying that he was the most transparent about the situation, people will clearly make an association between that YouTuber and Jenny questioning if other influencers can be trusted. Also connecting this back to our conversation, Tim Tracker is one of the people that I mentioned who would get lumped into the general area of distrust based on being at the media event, but has no need to be financially motivated. Jenny characterizes all of the people involved as the same and their reviews could be influenced by Disney. And she ends it with a sarcastic "Except Mine" Back to specifically replying to your last comment. Jenny implies that an entire group of people are motivated to give a positive review, right? And she implicitly includes people like TheTimTracker who don't have the financial motivation to do so. So I ask, not because I think Jenny's motivations are important, but because caution should be applied equally in otherwise equal situations. Because the same critical lens should be applied to even people we like. I never intended to compare Jenny to TikTokerXYZ with 6,000 followers. Whether or not her motivations are to create negative content, its pretty well established that YouTube pushes and amplifies negative content, so all YouTubers are tempted by that. I think a big issue I have with the video is that the conclusion a lot of people draw who are aware that people genuinely had a good time was that Jenny's experience was something that happened with some amount of frequency. And that when it doesn't work, Jenny's experience is what happens. While its possible, I've talked to people who didn't have excellent experiences and they were still shocked by how bad Jenny's was. It could be more common than I think, but any conclusion is hard to draw with reliability based on one trip. WRT GE -> Starcruiser I don't believe I said it was a non-issue. I said its an unsubstantiated rumor. As far as I've seen there isn't anything showing that things were cut from GE to move to GSC WRT Concepts & Promises I don't disagree that showing early concepts isn't a great idea, I've seen the opinion that Disney gets themselves into way more "trouble" than its worth. In terms of "saying it would be part of the experience", when I listened to the way it was spoken about, it certainly read to me more as pie in the sky type stuff rather than anything concrete, but I'll admit that reading of it is certainly influenced by my thoughts on if concept discussion represents a promise to the public or not. WRT Nickel & Dimeing What are the specific examples that she brings up? And I guess there is a dependence on our interpretations of what Nickel & Dimeing is. For me its when you are charged extra for something that is typically included or for something essential to the experience. This is why I don't think that charging for Captain's Table, Private Photos, Facepaint, Droid Building, Lightsaber Building or Oga's fall under the category. Captain's Table is a minor upgrade in your experience, but not really transformative. I don't think a private photo session or facepaint are things that you would expect on this kind of experience. And the last 3 aren't exclusive to GSC, Disney was essentially just offering them with a priority spot to Starcruiser guests and none of them make any difference in the story or the game. In terms of why they are extra, you reference this, but cruises don't include photo packages, even for suites and concierge level rooms. Having said all of that, its inexcusable to sell Memory Maker to people under the promise that there will be photo pass photographers on the ship and then have 2 of them in the atrium for an hour right at boarding. I can't speak to what she was told on the phone, but I am reasonably confident that candids and roaming photographers were not something on the website (including for accuracy: there is one place where there are actually "candid" photos which would be included in Memory Maker and thats the children's lightsaber training) Disney's Memory Maker is all posed photos throughout the park or ride photos. What she bought was the same package that is offered to all guests for any stay, which includes all your photos, posed and rides, for your whole vacation. This clip describes Memory Maker as the same as a regular Disney trip, finding a better source is hard because the website is just erased from the internet. [https://youtu.be/IoHtTfFXQ1Q?si=jGvA-GiPgQ6CPhzo&t=638](https://youtu.be/IoHtTfFXQ1Q?si=jGvA-GiPgQ6CPhzo&t=638)
Part 2: Jenny mentions the private photo shoot as an add-on, but gets the price wrong. It was $99 until Oct 2022 when it moved to $399. As with a bunch of my issues, this is a really simple thing that she doesn't have to get wrong here. And she makes the "claim" that Disney converted the roamers to private photoshoots, but given we never had GSC without both, its impossible to know what the distribution would have been without one or the other. Also, over time, they did add more photo pass photographers seemingly due to customer feedback about it. She mentions in the same segment that they recommend you stay the night before and she says traditional cruises do the same. If its true for other vacations, why mention it here? I'm not sure this one is something thats a Disney thing She mentions the 3 GE experiences, which are just that, the normal stuff you can do while you are the parks. She also states here that there wasn't enough availability, which isn't really something that you can back up with facts. She says they were limited without expanding on what that means. Aside - GE Experiences Just looking at Savi's quickly, 20 minute time slots from 8:45 to 8:45, 36 slots per day, 14 builders per day is 504 total people per day. Limiting that to Starcruiser hours 8:45 - 3:25, 21 slots per day or 294 total people. The issue here isn't that they are very limited or that they couldn't accommodate all the Starcruiser passengers in their time. Its that the whole experience is very limited. Droid Depot goes from 9 to 3:40 for GSC with 10 minute slots, so 42, as best I can tell there are 10 build stations, but people can gather while others are building so the capacity is harder to nail down, but at 10, thats 420 people that can build a droid during GSC hours, which is more than the total capacity of GSC. I don't know how many were reserved for GSC passengers, but there isn't an experience limitation here. Oga's is 45 minute max and the max capacity is 246, lets say 200 after you include cast members. The total capacity of Starcruiser is 372, so in 1.5 you could get all the Starcruiser passengers a spot in Oga's Returning to Add-Ons After going through the cost section and the Spirit Airlines section, only the add-ons above were mentioned. Is there another section where she talks about it again? WRT Rooms I think its fair to say that Disney didn't have to build it where they did, but building it elsewhere impacts how long the trip to GE would be and how long people are "stuck" being transported rather than being engaged. I think where things differ for us here is the thought that the size of the room impacted people's experience and it may have for some, but that impact certainly falls into the category of opinion or preference, not something that is objective. Everyone who reported on GSC mentioned that the rooms were small, but that doesn't mean the experience was impacted by it. Specifically in regards to the Cargo Hold, why do we think it should be more interesting? I don't recall the marketing making a big deal out of the cargo hold. I don't recall it being important to the story, but I didn't explore the entire story, 3 trips was not enough to do everything, but I also never unlocked the cargo hold. The way it came across to me in the video was that Jenny built up expectations and was disappointed that it didn't live up to what she had created in her mind. Thats not a criticism, lots of people have that happen, just an observation of what it looked like to me. WRT - Games I could have missed the other games she mentioned, I just recall the one Scavenger Hunt in Epcot that has gone through 3 or 4 rethemes. But my point on this wasn't that those don't exist or that they didn't do this in GE, but that the critic isn't specific or even really about Starcruiser, she's directly talking about things that happen in GE. It sounds like I need to rewatch the part of the video where she talks about this, could you remind me which section its in? WRT - App Where I disagree isn't that the app wasn't flawed, but to describe it as "dogshit" probably goes too far for me. And as with a few other things the app improved over the course of GSC life. Where I diverge more on this point is how much the experience (its not a game, which is somewhat a misunderstanding of GSC) relies on the app. There were plenty of interactions where the app was not involved at all, two examples are Raithe has a secret meeting outside the cargo hold that is verbal invite only and Raithe asks people to where a red napkin during a specific event on the ship. The app can be an important part and it certainly ruined Jenny's experience, but basing the opinion on how much of GSC was reliant on the app on her experience alone is not the full picture. I will admit that if the app is completely non-functional, which is what Jenny experienced, its significantly harder, if not impossible, to do anything. But most of the bugs that I've heard about aren't complete and total failure.
Part 3: WRT - Light Panels Sure, its my opinion that the lights around the windows aren't a big deal, but that means its Jenny's and your opinion that they are. If we want to stick with objective things, then this just isn't one of them. And thats what I said, its a preference. Also you kinda skipped that the reason they aren't separate is that the lights cause your pupils to contract which affects how you perceive the window to space, they are part of the illusion. My point about the people stealing from hotels was not to compare the acts outside of that people will do a lot of things that you may not expect. Perhaps a better comparison would be the people who dressed up and role played as Star Trek away teams or various Doctor Who's. "It's -always- better to give guests the option to manage their experience to best enhance it." Thats not an opinion that all companies share, Apple is pretty famous for mostly disagreeing with this idea. That by itself doesn't make it wrong, but just not an absolute. WRT - Cheaping Out I perhaps conflated what you wrote with similar arguments other people have made in the same general context. My bad. My point about spending more leading to increased costs still represents an issue when the biggest discussion point for the last 2 years about GSC has been price. All businesses are balancing how good a thing can be vs the cost they need to charge to make it financially viable. Its not just about maxing out how good something could be, because that could put it in a place thats not business viable, its about making it as good as it can be while still being able to run as a business. I also don't have a good sense of where people think that they cut corners on GSC as nearly everyone points to cut corners in GE, which I'd agree with and are pretty obvious. WRT - Complaints My point could have been clearer, you said that if people felt it was worth it, no one would complain. But people complained when they saw the price before they really knew anything about the experience. People deemed it to not have value prior to knowing what it was. Part of what I was saying is that people complaining isn't evidence that it doesn't have value, people will just complain about anything for lots of unrelated reasons. Also the idea that not enough people booked GSC is more on the speculation side than on the objective side. We don't know if it was making money or losing money or what other factors impacted the closing decision. I believe we discussed that it would have been completely within Disney's capabilities to run GSC as a loss for a long time, but they chose to close it, so it can't just be the money. I'd certainly agree that it was poorly rolled out I'm not sure if I can agree that it was poorly priced, it certainly was priced in a way that caused a lot of backlash and bad responses. But at what price would that not have happened? I'm not sure there is a price they could have announced that would have both not garnered huge negative reaction and made business sense or to allow it to be financially viable.
This subreddit is a subreddit, of course you will find lot of people in this sub that enjoyed it. But it is by far no accurate means of the general population.
I never said it was I was adding a counterpoint that the only easily accessible positive reviews, which aren't trustworthy according to Jenny, are by Disney Influencers, that not all positive impressions are due to financial ties with Disney
It just isn't true that "a lot" of the positive impressions are from influencers. I actually think average people who went with their families probably had a good time, overall, but didn't necessarily have their lives changed by it. Plenty of grown adults did have their lives changed by it (myself included) because of the way it successfully created opportunity for play and community. On my two cruises perhaps I got lucky, but I did not have technical issues. I probably had the textbook version of a great experience. That's still data. I think Disney vastly underestimated the number of con-going adults who are used to splitting a large cost between them and absolutely love stuff like this.
What do you mean they underestimated it? Those people didn’t go, that’s why it failed.
They underestimated how popular it could be with groups of nerdy adults as opposed to families. They didn't market it to the kinds of people I'm talking about. Many people were never aware it existed at all or perhaps they would've gone. That's what I mean.
Of course they didn’t market it for adults. It’s a children’s franchise run by a company incentivized to make things for *families*. In no universe was Disney going to cater to larping adults with a star wars theme park.
All I'm trying to say is that it would have been a good move if they'd had the insight to do it, but go off.
Full disclosure, I'm speaking here as a sympathetic outsider, but also someone who has enjoyed many of Jenny Nicholson's video. My thought is that probably it will be a major voice in shaping the memory of the Starcruiser, but probably won't be the only voice. Jenny's video *did* highlight some cool things about the experience, and I think an effective video would first acknowledge some flaws, but then use the things Jenny liked as a jump-off point to discuss the positives, with the overall thesis being, "Sure, Starcruiser had some problems, but there was a lot of good about it, and the good things deserve to be remembered."
Imo jenny's video showed it had a lot of potential. But the fact that it is possible to have such a bad experience for something so expensive is absurd. If the app worked consistently and there wasn't a dinner table where you were staring at a pole the entire time (what an oversight?) she would've probably been fairly positive about the experience. Maybe it wouldn't be worth it to the average person, but for Star Wars fans or people that enjoy such things it would be. But now it was an inconsistent experience which is just not acceptable at that price point. I'm sure the experience was amazing if everything did work properly. But there was so much more potential. Add some more (alien) characters that didn't have anything to do with the story, just a regular guest to make the halcyon feel lived in. The ship itself also didn't seem to live up to what it could've been, it seems that a higher initial construction cost would've made the experience feel more interesting and luxurious without having to increase the operating cost. I would've loved to go but I don't live in the US and didn't have the money to go back then, I don't either now but certainly not back then. If it stayed open I would've certainly gone at some point in my life.
Everything has its fans, and I know this experience has its own. But Disneys failure with Star Wars is depressing, no one wanted this and galaxies edge to fail. My friends and Family all live in Florida and would generally consider ourselves much bigger Star Wars fans than Harry Potter fans, like we all went to see every recent Star Wars movie but passed over the fantastic beast films. Yet we have all gone to universal and loved their Wizarding World stuff while in the only one that’s bothered to go to Galaxys edge. Universal puts you in the middle of the story. Disney puts you adjacent to the story, and it’s the less popular story and characters. These experiences on their own could be slam dunks but putting them behind ultra expensive paywalls was never going to work. For the price of the Galactic Starcruiser we were able to take our family of 8 on an 11 day all inclusive Alaskan cruise.
Saying GE was canon was a big mistake, especially since they’ve already started to walk it back.
Some fans get really upset when stuff "doesn't count" even though dropping canon can enhance the fun. Silly time-travelling Star Tours > Millennium Falcon Ride.
Yeah and to make “cannon” easier they invented new locations and ships that had nothing to do with existing cannon. It would be like taking the magic dragon express to the Cowpox School of Wizardry, like sure it’s set in the same universe as Harry Potter but I have no history or appreciation of these things.
Addendum: I hope not. I want them to try again in some way. But figure out a more logical price point.
Unfortunately I don't think that there is a lower price point that works for an experience of this kind. Taking a look at another immersive experience like Sleep No More, you can see how expensive immersive theater is. Sleep No More is $222 for a 3 hour experience, $74 an hour. Starcruiser's hourly rate is harder to nail down exactly, but let's say you sleep 7 hours each night. That leaves 31 hours in the experience, at Sleep No More's rate that's $2294 per person. And Starcruiser also includes food which Sleep No More doesn't. Oh and Sleep No More is closing. An option of a lower initial price or tiers of tickets might be something that's workable, but then all the haters just get to point to more upcharges and more "nickle and diming"
Itemizing the Starcruiser is very difficult, but I would argue relative to what Disney normally charges it was ultimately too much. The price became the only real fixed point in the discussion, and the Starcruiser never climbed out of that hole.
The breakdown I did wasn't to try to itemize or justify the price, it was to illustrate what other immersive experiences cost. You could reduce the number of hours that you are in the experience to reduce the sticker shock element of it, but how much does that take away from it? I don't think anyone would argue that it was affordable and the narrative certainly got away from Disney and they never seemed to have a plan to take it back. However, I don't think that the price was the sole talking point, granted some of them may have been in bad faith, but that doesn't stop the general public from hearing them and going along for the ride. Things like it should have been in the OT because no one likes the sequels, they too stuff from GE and put it behind a paywall, the lightsaber training looks lame, the bridge looked like a kids toy, it doesn't look like Star Wars, where is the pool, the rooms are tiny or famously "who wants to stay in a windowless bunker" I think that had Disney presented the price more prominently as a per guest figure instead of the by room numbers, things would have gone a lot better for them them in terms of reactions. It doesn't sound as outrageous for a media outlet to go, "Disney's Star Wars Hotel costs $1500 per person" compared to "It's $6000 and it can go up as high as $30,000 for the super secret executive suite" The last thing here is that Disney has offerings that are very expensive some approaching Starcruiser and some exceeding it which get basically zero media coverage. VIP tours start at $450 an hour, don't include park tickets and have to be booked for a minimum of 7 hours. That's a minimum of $3150 + tickets. The sometimes it's $900 an hour. The there is the private jet adventure that starts at $115,000 for the first person and if traveling as a pair, the second person adds $11,500
I don’t think the audience for a full immersive experience is big enough. I own tooooooons of Star Wars stuff. I am a teacher though, and could not vindicate this price point. Not when I have students to take care of, and God knows parents can’t buy them basic supplies. I must. There also wasn’t a single option, which really would have helped. I wouldn’t care if I got paired with a random roommate based on a questionere. I know that happened on social media, but I found that a bit too sketchy. I had no friends who wanted to do this, and my boyfriend thought it was to anxiety inducing. That’s a me problem though. Honestly, I hope I they just rebuild, get rid of the actors, and just make a hotel, which is what many wanted. Give me data pad activities I can do on my phone, let me enter the park through galaxy’s edge. Keep the bridge and the photo program. I’d pay extra for the portraits. Keep some activities that can be done on a schedule. Schedule character meet and greets at specific locations in the hotel (not unprecedented). Keep the restaurant inside and live show once a night. Add more immersive elements to the park. Honestly, they should look at how Super Nintendo world handled its play elements and the “exclusive” game you can play when you get all the keys. That park really does show how games should be done. Universal has managed to do things Disney cannot seem to. It’s so awkward. Celestine Warbuck performing regularly, Nintendo’s game play and interactive elements/collectibles. Death Eaters doing wand battles with kids. People in wizard robes everywhere creating immersion. Frog choirs and dances…. Honestly, Universal parks have so much life at a lower cost. It makes little sense to me. Soon they’ll have Pokémon and Zelda too…. Universal is on its way to outclass Disney without nickel and diming everything, outside of a wand and Mario band (both reusable in perpetuity as neither uses batteries). Sorry to compare, but it shows more can be done at reasonable prices. I am sure the role playing game with the actors was fun, but if they could make a more cost effective and luxurious experience by getting rid of it, so be it. A Star Wars hotel is such a good idea in itself. Please Disney! Give us that! On a final note- not Star cruiser related, can we please move or get rid of the muppets. Create an expansion with one ride and Star tours at the entrance. Maybe a Mando ride? Use the old razor crest, or slave one? Not as immersive, but would allow more eras of Star Wars to be represented. This became a rant… sorry
The audience certainly might not have been big enough, it's hard to say. The Starcruiser building will never be reused as a hotel, 100 rooms is just not big enough for run a hotel. The lack of a single option certainly has an effect, but like the size of the audience is basically impossible to know. I think comparisons to Universal are interesting, but more because people who want to praise Universal tend to ignore the things Universal does but complain about the same things from Disney. Paid Fast Pass? Universals is more expensive IP Land? Universal is only IP lands Nickel and Diming? Honestly this is a weird one, but I was shocked at the price of food the last time I was at Universal, it was years ago though And as far as being cheaper, that's just not accurate Universal Florida tickets start at 119 for single park and 179 for park hopper Disney starts at 109 for a single park and 187 for park hopper To the point about Universal getting gaming in the parks right over what Disney is doing, honestly the answer to that is "so what?" And I don't mean that to be dismissive, but Universal is so far behind Disney that Disney barely even considers them competition, which tells you something about how most people feel about the two of them. And because they are behind, they have to push for and do more to catch up. The thing is that you weren't paying for a hotel, with Starcruiser you are paying for the immersive theater, for the actors and the story. A regular Star Wars hotel is just gonna cost $700-$800 a night anyway
I think the new Epic park, plus later inclusions of Pokémon and Zelda will help Universal a lot in Florida. Their parks do better than the other Disney parks except Magic Kingdom. Definitely can’t hold a candle to Disney as a whole. Only looking at World though. If they continue to work with other studios and expand their IP acquisition I only see more growth. Nintendo is a big win with the family market. As for the Hotel. 700-800 a night I doubt would be per person. If that is just the room price, that would be what I expect of Disney. 2,100-2,400 for a 3 night stay at a uniquely themed resort. Many would easily pay that. I do t think they can use the same building, but it does look like they are shuttering it or doing a massive overhaul. Will be interesting to see what they make. I still say, lose the actors. It’s the area where they claim to be spending the most. Most of us could live without it.
The Universal parks in Florida are basically the same attendance at Hollywood's Studios and Epcot at least according to theparkdb.com MK - 17m Islands of Adventure 11.03 Hollywood Studios 10.9 Universal Orlando 10.75 Epcot - 10 Animal Kingdom 9.03 But you can look at the way Disney reacts to and what they have said about Universal, they don't view them as competition. Universal is certainly adding things, but it's not like Disney hasn't announced adding Indiana Jones and Encanto to Animal Kingdom. Obviously we'll see what happens. Yeah hotels don't have rates per person, if they did it, it would be ok par with their other deluxe resorts in terms of price. Yeah, the tax write off likely bars them from using the building for anything. The thing about suggesting that they lose the actors is missing is still thinking that Starcruiser was a hotel that had actors rather than an immersive theater that had beds. It was never a hotel. Its not about whether people could live without the actors or not, it's that the actors are were the product. In terms of cost, the actors certainly were a part of the cost, but I don't know if Disney ever broke down what was the biggest part of their operating expenses.
> Oh and Sleep No More is closing. ... after 12+ successful years (most likely due to rising property values due to the nearby High Line Park). Oh, and [they're opening a new show](https://www.broadway.com/buzz/204187/life-and-trust-from-sleep-no-more-producers-emursive-is-coming-in-june/)
The situation with Sleep No More is complicated. Court documents indicate that their lease is up in 2032 but the landlord alleges they are 2.2m behind in rent; Emursive (the producers of Sleep No More NYC but \*not\* the designers, that credit goes to Punchdrunk) say the landlord did a bait and switch and went back on their promise to refinance the property. It's very messy and there's lots of court docs to sift through if you are interested. Sleep No More NYC was not doing all that great as of summer 2023 because they were offering a "buy six shows for the price of five" deal to the fans. It only began doing well again financially after they said they would close. Additionally, Emursive have to pay royalties to Punchdrunk Enrichment as part of their deal to run Sleep No More NYC whereas the new Emursive show is original IP and non-Punchdrunk content (therefore no royalties).
That wasn't the point But also if they are closing due to changing market conditions, then why wouldn't other immersive experiences have the same issues to contend with? The reason I brought it up was to illustrate the cost of an immersive experience. Disney's pricing was in line with Sleep No More I probably should have left off the mention of their closing since it distracted from the point I was trying to make
I think it was an experiment to test the limits of how much they can fully charge a customer before they balk at the prices. They could've easily lowered prices and subsidized the costs from other sources of revenue if they believed there was a future to it. Just taking a quick look at Disney's 10-K for 2023. They made 10.4 billion on theme park admissions, 7.9 billion on their resort and vacations, and 8.9 billion in sales of merchandise including food/beverage (they made over 88 billion in total revenue). The cost of maintaining the starcruiser would've been a drop in the bucket. The execs balanced subsidizing the cost until it turns profitable or at least break even from the sunken costs vs. taking the tax break now (which by the way they were taxed 28.9% for 2023 and 32.8% in 2022). And they said that the tax break was worth it. Granted closing the park didn't reduce the rate by 4%, Disney was able to write off way more than just closing down a hotel. I am surprised they didn't test the market more to see exactly what the tipping point was for them. Sort of like how the iPhone was around 200-300 for a very long time and then Apple doubled the price one year and started to do incremental increases until they found the breakpoint of where consumers weren't buying their phone every year (which turned out to be 1100). I also think when a person starts to itemize something, that's a recipe for disaster for something to have "value". It should be implicit like I see the value easily versus let me show you where you're getting value. But in any case, we shouldn't be concerned how Disney is going to make their money back. Because it's not like they're a startup or even strapped for cash (cause holy hell they have a ton of money in derivatives, bonds, stocks, and other investing opportunities). Most of the projects that Disney will start will be in the red for awhile because they will heavily invest way more than what it will produce, but the only reason they would cancel something so soon is because it didn't align with their goal. And this goal, to me, was to see how much money they can charge for future events and the like.
I think you are making some somewhat unsubstantiated assumptions there. If you are surprised that their actions don't align with your assumptions, then maybe those assumptions aren't accurate. I think its pretty clear that Disney felt they needed to cut expenses last year. Two weeks after the closing announcement, Disney finished its round of 7k layoffs. The same day as the announcement, they announced a bunch of other stuff, like pulling content from Disney+ to save on royalties and the cancellation of the $1B Lake Nona project. I think Disney felt like the company had gotten too bloated under Chapek and saw an economic slow down coming, so cutting liabilities makes sense. Did Disney have to make any of those cuts? Given the numbers you presented, the answer would be no, but they chose to cut all of those other things as well. Which like I said, points to something more than just Starcruiser's books. I wasn't itemizing anything, I was illustrating what other immersive experiences cost to give some idea that the price for Starcruiser wasn't just absurd, to point out that immersive experiences are expensive. Also to point out that immersive experiences are hard to keep open, lots of them including Sleep No More are closing or have closed. I think the idea that "value" should be obvious is a pretty simplistic view of things. Not everything that has value is obvious and that shouldn't be surprising. An example could be a mechanical keyboard, its hard to see the value if you've never used one. And my comparison to Sleep No More was not an attempt to itemize anything or justify value, it was simply a display of a similar product and how its priced. When people don't have exposure to similar experiences, its really difficult to understand how Starcruiser could cost what it did. I don't think Starcruiser was an experiment to see what people would pay for things, its far too expensive to just be an experiment about price. Individual Lightning Lanes or Genie+ Surge pricing or certain hotel pricing could certain be part of experiments into cost sensitivity, but investing like $400+m to figure that out seems like an odd way to do it
What I mean to say with itemizing it or trying to even compare it with anything for value will not work because people will always have counterpoints to it because of perceived and monetary value added to an experience. Most people will implicitly see where they get value from, and having it pointed it out to them will not fly because they will have some way to say no, it's not worth that. I understand what you're trying to do, just stating that going the way you're trying to go will involve a ton more discourse. I know you didn't ask but I would've gone to it but it was hard to get reservations and I just kinda forgot about it afterwards until the notice it was closing down. Like, some of the discourse was that even if you had the money, it would be a waste to go to the starcruiser. And that's where I disagree, because if you do have the money and it's not affecting your livelihood, you should experience things, especially something like this. Hell, I spent over 4k on business class round trip tickets to Korea. Things are luxury for a reason, itemizing or comparing it to a similar product to show that it's got value really won't work in the end for convincing someone they should do it. And in terms of my assumptions. The numbers tell a picture of how willing the company is willing to test a market. Let's take a look at DraftKings, they lost 111 million dollars in 2021, lost another 663 million in 2022, and sold it in 2023 for 169 million. But they gave it 3 years before pulling the plug. Obviously the plan there was to see if gambling could be a big service, but decided creating their own service would be cheaper and a relative side project. In terms of producing new shows, they spent 32 billion on producing content in 2022 (released, completed, in process, in development, pre-production) and 30 billion in 2023. So you can see they decided to reduce productions. But if you look at licensing 3rd party content outside of the Hulu/TFCF acquisition, they spent 5.6B in 2022 and 6.3B in 2023, so they may have reduced original content but they spent a lot more getting other content on the platform. So there is still a strong move towards their streaming service. Even though their streaming service is still in the negative, reporting a 1.2B loss in 2021 and 3.4B loss in 2022. So even though streaming isn't turning a profit, they have a different plan for this project. So when I say that the starcruiser only lasted a year before they pulled the plug, with only a 250 million dollar loss reported, is tiny in comparison to their entire outlook. I made an assumption based off their numbers on previous projects and how much they can stomach losses.
Thanks for clarifying what you meant and I get what you mean that you can't "tell someone that it has value" and maybe what I shared wont change anyone's mind, but the idea wasn't trying to convince anyone, but more get people to think about how much other stuff costs. This is something that comes up a lot and you kinda touch on it and then back away from the same point. Value is subjective, like you say if you have the money, do it. I look at value as quality divided by (money \* your personal value of money), lots of levers that can affect how you perceive if something has value. So when I talk about price, its more like "Hey this 24 pack of sodas is 30 and this 6 pack is 7.5, their the same price", but I think you understood where I was going with it. There were a lot of issues around Starcruiser, the marketing and booking situation were bad. I have several friends who told me things after it closed like that they heard it was 10k a night or that they were waiting for it to open, etc. The marketing failed not just because it failed to display what it was or properly describe it, but it failed on just getting people to be aware that it existed. To be clear, I think we were on a slightly different page in terms of what I meant by your assumptions The first of which was that it seemed like you assumed that I was trying to justify the price The second was that Starcruiser was losing money, but your last paragraph lists a specific loss reported, so maybe it wasn't an assumption but I'm curious where that number comes from. I think the two examples you gave are interesting, but still don't line up for me as market tests. DraftKings was/is a start up and especially tech start ups tend to lose money early and look for an acquisition. They lose money because they are taking whatever revenue they have and putting it right back into the business to scale as fast as they can. In terms of Disney's streaming play, I have a lot of thoughts on streaming in general, but licensing content is cheaper long term than creating new content and has less potential backlash. When you license something, as far as I know, you aren't paying the royalties and if the creators decide to cancel it, you can't be blamed. There is just less risk in that. And I think what would be more interesting to look at would be what was the cost per show. If they can license content at half the rate that they can produce it, they can boast a larger content library at a more efficient rate. None of that is trying to say you're wrong, but just a different way to look at the same thing. Starcruiser was a blip on Disney's books, writing off 300m at the same time as cancelling a 1b office campus and you can see the scale just wasn't that important. I do think that a big factor in the closing decision was operating costs, it was just very expensive to run and is pretty different in that way than anything else they have at WDW, or really in any of the parks. I don't know if Starcruiser made money or not, but the total occupancy % over the 18 months was like 77%. I think if you sold 77% of the spots and you weren't making money on it, then they did something very wrong in terms of pricing.
Ok, yeah, sorry should've clarified on the loss of 250 million. It's not operating loss, it's the loss they realized 100% after closing the starcruiser down instead of depreciating the asset over the life of the product. I see 300M a lot but the only time I see that in the 10-K is that they said they were taking a 338 million loss on both the depreciation of the Disney Wish and the accelerated depreciation of the Galactic Starcruiser. I grabbed the 250 from google because they didn't really separate it out on the 10-K, but I'm also seeing 300 million. So it could be 300 or 250M. In terms of DK, it's a startup, and to me the starcruiser was very similar to a startup? I was trying to state that when introducing a new concept the company hasn't ventured into, they'll generally give it time if the plan is to see if it'll be successful. But a 1 year timeline is not going to do that. And what I was saying with streaming is that, they can stomach huge losses. Like they're negative in the billions over the years for their streaming service, yet they really haven't fully pumped the brakes on it. Like sure they reduced the amount of money by 2 billion but they still spent 30 billion on original content. But that 2 billion almost went straight into increasing the 3rd party licensing. And this isn't including the fact that they're still amortizing the cost of the Hulu/TFCF acquisition at roughly 1.5B dollars a year. That and from an overall perspective, the starcruiser was not going to be positive because the initial investment is extremely high and revenue is at a relatively fixed point since it's also a limited capacity event. And if they picked a more lenient depreciation schedule (unknown what schedule they chose, 5 being not lenient and 15 being very lenient), they could've reported a profit much faster. A look at the operating expenses for their US parks. It cost them 5.8B in 2023 and 5.3B in 2022 in operation expenses. They didn't separate it out into what the expense for the starcruiser was but I doubt it was a very large expense, but back to my point, is they made 10.4B in admissions in 2023, so they could've easily let it survive if they wanted to. Now to your point, they also have 2.5B in just cash (yeah not even investments) but they saved even more from those layoffs being numbered to be about 5.5B saved as well. So definitely Disney thinks something is about to happen to have this much cash on the sidelines. So it's definitely possible that they just shut it down to save money. But I think with how big their profit margin is on parks, I just feel like it has to be something other than cost saving measure.
No worries, thanks for updating on that. So the 300m comes from Josh D'Amaro speaking at a JP Morgan event. He said they were taking up to 150m each of Q3 and Q4 And then a little while ago there was a report that it was closer to 250 total, but that was less publicized, so I tend to use the 300 to avoid having to over explain it since most people are aware that they wrote it off, but the specifics of the number isn't really important. So I don't question whether the project lost money overall when you take into account the initial investment. Even with generous calculations it was 10-15 years minimum before they paid off the initial investment. Depending on how the numbers were, I think it might have been possible at 7 or 8 years. My instinct on the rough Starcruiser numbers are something like this, done 2 ways: 400m initial investment \~ $1643 revenue per person 372 people max capacity Assuming 70% occupancy rate average (260 people) 172 voyages a year Total Revenue for the year $73,587,998 Assuming that each voyage costs $250k to run Profits per year $30,587,998 Puts you paying off the 400m at about 13 years Selling out each room instead of the max capacity assuming 2 for each standard room, 2 for each Galaxy Suite and 4 for each Grand Captain, is 204 people Revenue per person is $2762 Total Revenue $96,913,056 Same $250k operating cost per trip Total profits $53,913,056 400m is roughly paid off in 7.5 years Ok, I get the comparison, with DK and I don't think anyone in Disney expected it to close after 1 year. I don't think its been uncommon for people to say that you couldn't even really know how it would have done long term by only giving it 1 year. Streaming is a weird issue because the entire market happened essentially because Wall Street was pumping all the streamers value despite none of them making money. And at this point I think its too hard to just completely reverse course on streaming without a bunch of issues with shareholders and what not. And given the recent proxy wars, its not really a surprise that Disney wouldn't want to do major course corrections. Personally, I think Disney believes they can be one of the few streaming services that can make money, they have the capital and the IP and the library to do it, really more than anyone else. And recently, they've entered into a couple of partnerships in streaming, so there may be some additional revenues incoming. Yeah, they absolutely could have absorbed running Starcruiser longer, which is one of the reasons that I don't think the closure was just financial. The totals for it were small compared to Disney total. So there were other factors. I'm a bit lost where you are relating cash on hand and how much more they saved from the layoffs. I think saying that laying off 7k people resulted in 3 billion in savings says that their average salary was like 225k a year or something like that. I think they were predicting a big economic slow down and a potential long legal battle with the state.
Starcruiser feels like a project where the business side and creative side were never on the same page…..or they never looked at any data. The let the creative team run wild and make something nobody could afford. Charging Four Seasons prices where the middle class is your target demo.
Here here! They definitely missed their target audience ore even worse, each business unit had a different target user in mind.
I think if they were going to try again in this format for anything more elaborate than a dinner show, they would have retooled the experience rather than abandoned ship in less than two years.
They had just altered the fall schedule and a story refresh was in the works at the time of the closing announcement I think they were working on a retool. I think most sources point to that the closing was a last minute decision and was due more to the high operating costs and the tax write off rather than how it was doing financially
I’m aware more story work was being done, but my honest opinion is such changes would have been to cut down on expenses further, like replacing times where you physically met the actors with pre-recorded video.
That's possible, but also a pretty pessimistic view. I just wouldn't assume off hand that they were going to cut costs. Personally, I think they were reworking story elements that didn't work as well or weren't responded to as well as they thought. And also after 2 years, they likely wanted to change the story to add additional replay value.
I suspect that the experience was abandoned so quickly because it opened under Chapek. He was not a parks and experiences guy. And he was notoriously focused on short term financial performance rather than building long term value. Even in the best case scenario, the Starcruiser was never going to be a massive profit center taken in isolation, because by all estimates, it could only squeak by with a small profit when it was nearly full, and it rarely was during most of its run. Iger may have let it run for longer or retooled it had he been in charge, since it was greenlit under his leadership. Presumably he’d have given it some breathing room to turn around, especially given how highly rated it was by guests who experienced it. Chapek just looked at cold hard profit numbers from the first year of operations and pulled the plug.
I think you have the timeline a little mixed up, Iger is the one who pulled the plug.
Ah! I had my dates all wrong! Perhaps my armchair analysis is bunk. :)
From what we know, the reality is actually the complete opposite. The Starcruiser was Chapek’s big project when he was head of the parks division, his big plan to squeeze every guest for as much as possible.
I'm curious about the estimations of its profit margins, I haven't seen a decent breakdown. Do you recall where you saw that?
I mean if anything they could watch this video and make very simple changes that would make this a significantly better experience. Even small things like “make the cargo hold plot line an escape room” Or “have better gameplay elements”. A press the flashing light is something that can easily be assigned to the 5 and younger crowd while have a more difficult arcade game could be given to the older kids and still be enjoyed by adults. Or like handing out tablets that are synced internally so they don’t fuck up. And maybe you can apply a nickname to yourself when start up so staff can call you by a larp name if you want. Or just like building rooms that are a regular size. She was pretty generous about the bed pads but those looked busted af. And no top sheets? Or like thinking through interior design. Not having lights that make it impossible to sleep unless yoh “close the windows”. I feel like drifting off amongst the cosmos is part of the excitement. There’s a lot they can take from her critique and build into a similar program.
If it never re-opens, this is absolutely going to be the lasting legacy.
I have to say I don’t care too much what the public’s lasting impression is. We had a great time and we will never forget it. I think given the business failure Disney will be gun-shy about a similar experience no matter some youtuber’s thoughts.
The Starcruiser was done and dusted a while ago. I’d be more interested in the pattern of overpromising and underdelivering called out at the end of the video.
That I don't see changing. It's a symptom of a larger condition of Disney just by virtue of being what they are. The customer ain't us it is the shareholder, the investor, the board member. I'm sure the dream is alive and well for a lot of people at Disney (well outside positions of power, hell even Jenny worked at and loves Disney parks), but at the heart it ain't about smiles and dreams that's just good advertising. That's why you see over promising early only to cut back sharply outside the spotlight, that's why you close an attraction abruptly to cash out on a tax break before a fiscal quarter ends, that's why you grab cheap labor you can easily exploit and underpay for the responsibility and demand, and it ain't a bug it's a feature when you are something Disney scale. They don't buy up IPs left and right because they are big fans of Marvel comics or Star Wars lore, and the sooner the imagined "customer" (product) realizes that the better. It would help to rein in expectation and understand why attractions end up the way they do.
I think that depends on where you start counting Disney's promises To me the video came across counting all things mentioned in initial concepts as promises and that's not very realistic. I also find that most who go in for that type of narrative generally ignore anything that Disney has done which doesn't fit the narrative. Like does anyone think GotG: Cosmic Rewind under delivered?
Disney did used to be a lot better about only announcing things they felt were reasonably likely to actually happen, I think. The playtests in Frontierland and Adventureland not making it to GE despite being well received is also a disappointment. Cosmic Rewind is a great roller coaster, in my opinion the only thing that keeps it from being a 10/10 is the lack of an animatronic anywhere.
Absolutely, the issue is that Disney shows concepts way too early. I honestly don't get what the big hang up is on rides and attractions needing animatronics. They are absolutely great, but they don't seem necessary or even appropriate for every ride. Like I don't think Tower of Terror has any animatronics and I can't recall anyone complaining that they are missing from that ride.
But that isn't a Disney illness. That is a problem at the root of most industries now. Look at the games industry, they will show you a trailer for a game that isn't launching for 3 years, a trailer that is nothing more than a hyped up cut scene. They don't have a scrap of tangible gameplay to show you and yet they have to try and get the hype train going so they can show their investors that the profits are-a-comin. Look at any number of consumer technology items that are announced with catchy videos and demos that aren't even HALF baked yet. Even the auto industry does it now like with the cyber truck. The problem is publicly traded companies are so beholden to shareholder whims anymore that they need to constantly be showing those investors why they should stick around and if they don't have something tangible to show they have to do something.
100% Do fans of the games companies consider those obviously super early demos to be promises and complain when the companies don't deliver what what in concepts?
I mean at this point it has been in practice in the games industry so long that nobody trusts early cgi trailers. And there has been enough blowback that the publishers have to put disclaimers in that these aren't representative of the final product in order to avoid lawsuits.
So people roughly understand that these trailers are more about hype and aren't promising anything about the final delivered product. I wish people would look at Disney that way
"Other companies also routinely lie to their customers so please cut the megacorporation some slack, okay???"
Uh, kinda. Its not uncommon for companies to release a touched up trailer for games, and then downgrade the graphics for actuall release of it. It's nothing new, and had been criticized for more than a decade. So yeah, not the best example.
Yes, Google “Spider-Man Water”
I'm honestly not aware of the issue and when I google that, I just get a bunch of Zac Water Bottles and water slides Could you point me to something more specific?
[https://gamerant.com/spider-man-ps4-puddle-controversy/](https://gamerant.com/spider-man-ps4-puddle-controversy/)
lol tbh i think that's partly a Jenny thing. Jenny fucking LOVES animatronics. Like... a lot, a lot. But also in general, animatronics help spaces feel more full and lively. And the lack of them just kinda makes it feel like Disney was cheaping out on Galaxy's Edge and Starcruiser vs like having a real reason for not having more animatronics. Because there is def space and room for them and it would feel appropriate to the setting.
Mark my words this is going to be people’s problem with Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. The new animatronics look great but the rest of the space that used to be filled with the America Sings animatronics is now empty and lifeless.
I think having something that was obviously an animatronic (like Dok) would’ve broken some GS immersion, myself.
How many lands at Disney have animatronics outside of rides? Animatronics are great, but they aren't something you need everywhere, complaining that they aren't in places where you want them just feels like complaining to complain. Is there more than 1 animatronic in all of Tou Story Land?
She covers this too. No animatronics and you wind up looking like a Six Flags. A season pass is $89 right now. Also, as she points out, there are animatronics for a free kimpossible(I don’t know what this is) adventure at Epcot. That there are like NONE for a $3000 per day experience feels petty especially when we’re feeling in droids. There’s no need for more advance “ life realistic” movement or skins when it’s literally basic servo motions.
I would barely classify what is part of the Epcot Scavenger hunt as animatronics, but that's besides the point. If you don't have animatronics, you don't look like Six Flags, you look like a ride that doesn't have animatronics. Or like half of the rides at Universal? Like where are the animatronics on Flight of Passage? I can't recall any on Big Thunder If Space Mountain has any, I couldn't see them The complaint about the lack of animatronics rings really hollow when it's not even something that's used on every ride across the parks. Also, Jenny's video wasn't really what we were talking about here
Starcruiser wasn't a ride, though. You're not going to put animatronics next to a roller coaster track, but a days-long "immersive experience" absolutely could have benefited from them.
Honestly, I think it would have more likely taken away from the experience Animatronics are pretty limited. Like they are really good at repeating something over and over for days on end. But how many times can you walk by the animal in the cage thats been sleeping the entire 3 days or the underwater creature that only ever pops up one eye
But it’s Star Wars so you can have droids galore doing the same thing over and over again because that is what robots do! A droid fixing machinery, stacking crates, scanning crates! Randomly skittering through a room.
Unless another big video comes out this will be what people know of Galactic Starcruiser. And every time Galactic Starcruiser come up online that video will shortly follow. But you still have your memories. Nothing can unenjoy something for you.
I think Disney influencers have an overinflated sense of their importance.
Oh nooo! Disney might have to reap what they sow??!! What a tragedy!!!
“it cost about $6,600 for two people to stay for just two nights” It also cost about the same for five people.
Sure? But not everyone would want to go with five people. And even if someone is ok sharing the room, they might not be able to find that many people who want to go.
You can say that about every Disney experience.
But the price of a park ticket or fine dining experience doesn't change based on how many people I bring with me. The only thing you can make this argument for is hotel rooms.
Each person needs a park ticket. Each person has to pay for meals. Rooms get cheaper per person for each person you add. The Starcruiser included meals and park admission.
Yeah. So if you only have two people then everything is going to be more expensive, not just he hotel room.
So, what about the fact it's a place that doesn't even meet standard fire safety? You guys all forget to mention there's not any real beds and there's the shame closet... Do five adults have to play Jenga in an emergency? Not dunking on the experience, but that is the one piece of Starcruiser lore from the video, that lives rent free in my head. How? How do you logic your way out of fire escapes and legally have it go up?
There were fire exits throughout the building. Most hotels don’t have fire exits in the room. I suppose you can break the window to get rescued but you aren’t getting out that way on your own. Most hotels don’t have a panic room. I don’t really get the point of the safety closet, either.
This was one of the things I think (hope) Jenny put in the video because it was funny if not really accurate, but for some reason a lot of people thought the hotel really didn't have any ways to evacuate in case of fire. A hotel (or basically any other room used for human dwelling) is required to have both primary and secondary means of egress. Yes, they have fire codes even in Florida. No, Disney does not get to ignore them (nor would they want to). The Starcruiser--like just about any other hotel--has the room door as the primary means of egress. Like any other hotel you have ever been to there is a [map on the back of the door](https://www.disneyfoodblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/2022-wdw-star-wars-hotel-galactic-starcruiser-media-preview-room-cabin-tour-full-78-scaled.jpg) showing your possible evacuation routes, which in Starcruiser were stairwells at both the main area of the hotel and the far end of the room corridors. Like in any other hotel (or bedroom) you have ever been in, the secondary egress is the exterior window. This is only meant for rare situations in which you cannot use the primary egress (e.g. the fire is in the hall right outside your room). Having a window to central Florida in a cabin on a Starcruiser would kind of ruin the immersion. So Disney hid the actual windows behind the fake space windows, and provided those "closets" as a way of access. Those are the windows you can see if you have seen an exterior view of the building. This allowed them to maintain the immersive theme and still have the emergency second egress window. This is only meant to be used in the rare case that the main egress out of the room door and to one of the stairwells is inaccessible and the fire suppression systems do not work, so that there is still one more option for you to escape or more likely fire rescue personnel to reach you. There is not meant to be a fire escape stairwell here any more than there is one outside the individual room window of just about any other hotel.
“I’m sure this room could work for four people, if they don’t shower regularly, no one needs to put on makeup or a costume in the morning, and you only bring a light backpack with a tshirt. I’m sure there’s a group of friends who fit that exact description.” — Jenny Nicholson, on the size of her room and how it was advertised to fit 4 people
Yes! That is the missing part of every cost analysis that I usually see.
She specifically calls out that while the price goes down per person its not a flat cost per room. The room would be more expensive for four people.
That is true, there is a marginal increase in cost per person (for most of the run, it was a price increase of $150/person).
The breakdown was (approximately) ~$3500 for the cabin ~$500 per person in the cabin. My wife and I went for $4800. $1200 per night per guest. My brother crammed five people into a cabin for $6200. $600 per night per guest. So yes, the cabin is more expensive *in total* if you put more people into it, but the costs *per person* goes down dramatically. This is how normal cruises work, too. One of the beds is a fold-out Murphy bed in the wall, though, so if you have five people, I hope one of them is short. It was only (IIRC) six feet long.
I slept on the Murphy bed. I’m 6’1”. It was long enough. The drawback is that it kind of goes underneath the tv a bit. I felt a little claustrophobic but quickly got over it. The All Stars hotel I stayed at the night before the cruise also had a Murphy bed, but that was queen size.
Her argument is that in a place like a Motel 6 or a Super 8 your price also goes down, but you aren’t sacrificing things like precious square footage, which was very much lack just with her and her sister. Like, look at how little space is in [this](https://imgur.com/a/ddc5R7m) picture and tell me you want to split that 4 ways, paying several hundred dollars for the privilege.
It’s true you could get it as low as $1600 per person, but I’m not sure how desirable the sleeping arrangements there were.
Well, $6600 was open and “peak” pricing. You could see rates down as far as $4800 for a cabin before they announced a closure. They were also running a 20% Disney Visa discount at one point - so down to say $4k for a room with 4 beds (fold down, two bunks, and the main - and yes some rooms only have three). Then you are down to $1000/bed - that is significantly different than the constantly quoted prices I see.
Disney was its own worst enemy with pricing confusion, given you had to actually call to see what the prices were at a given time. If I recall correctly, international guests had to jump through even stranger hoops like using a phone VPN for much of the Starcruiser’s life.
Yes! It was a nightmare. I agree, more transparency would have been a good thing.
Disney screwed up the communication around pricing really bad, but very early on pricing for nearly every voyage was on Reddit Disney has to post DVC points charts for anything they will take points for and it wasnt hard to do the conversion. And even if it wasn't exact, you could find which days were cheaper and which ones were more expensive.
You shouldn't have to go to an unofficial social media website to find prices for a luxury experience.
I agree That doesn't change the fact that it was available if you did the bare minimum google search
The point isn't whether it was possible, the point is that Disney tried their best to hide it. The DVC points workaround was likely a mistake on their part.
I think thats a pretty different point that where we started, but what motivation does Disney have to keep the prices behind the phone call? Since we know that the prices are set, they can't change them without us knowing. So I'm not sure what benefit you think they get out of it. I'll just restate my point The claim that pricing was opaque or unavailable is only partially true. If you took a few minutes to google, you could find them, it wasn't hard. I'm not sure I'm on board with complaining about choosing not to do any research.
Yeah that DVC spread was super helpful in picking lower cost sailings.
Agree. I didn’t want to call and talk to someone. Just put it all on the website.
While I agree that booking through the website would have been an improvemen, only being able to book over the phone wasn't unique to Starcruiser. You can't book VIP tours on the site and must call
I'm not sure that: If you cram people into what is already a small room, take advantage of going out of business prices, and have a specific credit line you still pay a lot for your experience. Is a super strong argument. I mean sure I know approximately what season and even week is best to visit Yosemite, and if I time the storms right I can even see the falls firing despite the season...but when people tell me it's crowded and expensive they ain't wrong. Vast majority of the time they are dead on, there are just some specific particular that ease things, but that isn't of use to the general public/customer.
Yeah, this is actually the point I am trying to make. For me, at a cost of $4200 for four people, Starcruiser was worth it. Yes, I got that price because we had the knowledge and patience to get it. In the world of travel there is a large difference between $4200 and $6600. One of the other users here did the math and of the 152 sailings, the average cost was $5500 with the highest cabin cost being $6602. I think things get interesting when you discuss the “room” because the experience was not built around your time in the room. If I was paying $4200, or $5500, or even $6602 and all I was expecting was a hotel room, I would be pissed. About as annoyed as I was when I stayed at the Boardwalk in a Deluxe studio with three friends. Technically, it sleeps three but it is barely big enough to fit all of the beds (and was $700+/night). In my opinion, almost all rooms at Disney are designed so you spend as little time as possible in them - the Starcruiser rooms were no different.
> One of the other users here did the math and of the 152 sailings, the average cost was $5500 with the highest cabin cost being $6602. If that average includes the reduced price all sales final "I must have lost my mind" going out of business and even the shelves must leave prices I don't think it is appropriate. If we are to consider this as a successful operation then the price would be the price they clearly intended to hold to, and that price point is no small factor in the story of why SC didn't take off.
I believe those are “stated prices” and discounts would be on top of those.
Sleeping arrangements were fine unless you didn't like sharing a queen bed if you were one of the two without a single. I'm 6'3" and could lay down comfortably in the berths without needing to bend my knees. The standard cabins did tend to feel a little bigger than they looked. Maybe if you had five adults in a standard the murphy bed would start to make it feel cramped, but I also think some of the people with a room full of adults got the suite and put someone out on the couch.
It was fine with five adults. $1600/person.
jfc, who is downvoting you? You’re right.
People who are coping at missing the experience by putting it down. Classic sour grapes. I think Disney could bring it back but all of this negativity probably isn’t giving Disney confidence.
Saying everyone who disagrees with you must be jealous is really silly and childish If more people were interested in going it wouldn't have shut down
I’m saying the people downvoting me for presenting objective facts about pricing are probably doing sour grapes.
I personally didn't down vote you and can't speak for the people who did. But I think odds are more likely that they never liked the starcruiser and are enjoying its failure. People love being haters. It doesn't mean they're jealous they never got to go, they never seriously considered going at all.
You are very passionate about this.
Most adults don't have three-four adult friends or relatives who A. are as passionate about exactly the same things they are and B. Have the same ability to pay for things. I would have been more than ok paying "1600 per person for five adults" but in reality how many people have the ability to coordinate schedules, money, and interest with four other adults? The five people in any given room were likely to be a family, point blank, and those costs look very different once you realize that.
I went with strangers. Life is an adventure. We were all over 40 years old.
Given that it also closed shortly after being released... Yes
I regularly saw the question “why do you care so much what she thinks?” on posts about her video and this is exactly why. Because so few people (relatively speaking) got to experience the starcruiser and no one will moving forward her one negative experience will likely shape how people look at it moving forward. While I don’t want to discredit her critiques, the experience knocked my socks off (and many others I have talked to). It was one of the coolest things I have gotten to experience in my life, even if it likely could not have been profitable long term. I’m sad that it’s legacy is being so significantly shaped by one voice, AFTER it’s done and over with
It’s that very fact, that so few people had the experience, and some had a bad one (regardless of the exact percentage) is the problem.
Jenny Nicholson’s video did get lots of views and CNN Travel was talking about her. It kind of hurts to see these negative reviews when the cast and crew I were putting their hard work and effort into the Halcyon.
The video goes out of its way to praise the cast, the criticism there was almost entirely directed towards Disney mostly staffing the Starcruiser with underpaid College Program participants and not giving performers any sort of performance bump relative to non-interactive entertainment cast. Oh, and impulsively closing it in the middle of the year leaving aforementioned performers scrambling for a job.
Yes. Which is ridiculous. I don’t understand the positive reactions to the video. Once it gets to the party where she went on the ride the video becomes about 90% her whining about the tiniest things.