Earlier in May, filmmaker and critic Jenny Nicholson released the four-hour YouTube documentary The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel. The video has since commanded nearly 6 million views, and spawned dozens of follow-up thinkpieces, ranging from fervent hand-wringing over the diminished nature of the modern theme park experience, to critics arguing against the continued commercial viability of the Star Wars brand itself, to genuine surprise at consumer appetite for long-form video content on YouTube. I personally don’t have a lot to add to the discourse, other than this: Nicholson is right about the app. There was no hope for the hotel with that app.
I was there, Gandalf, during an abbreviated tour of Galactic Starcruiser hosted by Disney Parks in February 2022. As I made clear in my review of the Star Wars hotel, Polygon was invited to the four-hour event on Disney’s dime. In fact, you can see footage from the very same tour that I was on around the two-hour mark in Nicholson’s video.
At no time during that junket were the many influencers or the handful of press present on board the Galactic Starcruiser, known as the Halcyon, given access to the Datapad app. Instead, the junket was verbally annotated by Disney’s tour guides as though we had been using the app all along. Cast members directed us to certain in-fiction events and performances as though we had been welcomed into those spaces by the app. But Nicholson’s investigation, based on her own firsthand account of the full experience as well as anecdotal reports posted on social media by dozens of other guests, paint a damning picture of a piece of software that simply didn’t work as intended.
The Galactic Starcruiser Datapad, itself baked into the larger My Disney Experience app, was supposed to be the conduit that connected guests to the storyline of their choice during their stay at the Star Wars hotel. In practice, however, it’s clear that the app only worked some of the time. As a result, a significant portion of the guests that attended the (at minimum) roughly $5,000 two-day experience were set adrift, left untethered from whatever levers were available to the staff on site to properly involve them in the goings-on aboard the starship. The only solution for some guests was to step outside the fiction, pick up the phone or get in line with a customer service representative at the hotel, and complain the old-fashioned way.
What killed Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser? I don’t think it was the presence of Rey and Kylo Ren or any of the other trappings of the modern-day trilogy. And I don’t think it was the dearth of engaging things to do at the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge theme park either, although that probably didn’t help matters much. What ultimately torpedoed the Star Wars hotel was bad app design, a buggy piece of software that was never quite up to the task.
Sadly, the Star Wars hotel is no more. The Halcyon took guests on a final voyage last year in September. It’s a shame, because some of the performances — especially those involving Rey and her allies in the Resistance — were extraordinary. There’s clearly only so much heavy lifting that a dedicated team of actors can do when the digital director driving the action fails as spectacularly as the Datapad app did here.
