Star Wars-themed Disney hotel promises fully immersive experience
By Lorenzo Castro E.
Lake Buena Vista, Florida, Feb 25 (EFE).- Offering people an immersive Star Wars experience and the feeling of a genuine movie set is the promise of a new hotel that opens to the public on March 1 near Disney’s Hollywood Studios in the US state of Florida.
The upscale Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel’s attractions include role-playing games on board the Halcyon interstellar cruiser, in which guests must choose to side with either the Resistance or the First Order, a military dictatorship that rose out of the ashes of the Galactic Empire.
Guests also will receive light saber training, enjoy panoramic and hyper-realistic views of space from each passenger cabin and interact with beloved Star Wars characters like Chewbacca.
Ann Morrow Johnson, Walt Disney Imagineering’s executive producer and creative director working on the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel, told Efe that this type of interaction, in which guests are placed inside the story, in something brand new.
Disney developed the project over more than six years through a consulting arrangement with Lucasfilm, a Walt Disney Studios unit best known for creating and producing the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises.
The goal was to ensure that every element and detail of the 100-cabin hotel was consistent with the iconic film and multimedia franchise created by American director, producer and screenwriter George Lucas.
But the new hotel is not for all budgets, with a two-guest, two-night stay costing $4,809 and a four-guest (three adults and one child), two-night stay coming in at $6,000 total, or $749 per guest per night.
The stay at the Galactic Starcruiser will include an excursion to the Black Spire Outpost on the planet Batuu, which is part of the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge themed area at Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park.
The story the guests participate in during their stay culminates in a climactic clash between Kylo Ren, supreme leader of the First Order; and Rey, the main heroine of the Resistance, Efe observed during a tour arranged for members of the media.
The experience also includes live music performed by Gaya, a Twi’lek female singer who became a galactic superstar during the First Order-Resistance war, and an AI logistics droid named D3-09 that interacts with guests via video inside their cabins, not only answering their questions but also asking for their help with special tasks or missions on board the ship.
And once they arrive on Batuu, guests will be able to transform the Play Disney Parks app into a Star Wars: Datapad that, according to Disney’s website, will allow them to “translate a variety of languages from across the galaxy, scan objects all around the spaceport to discover precious cargo, tune and decrypt communications sent by the planet’s many residents and hack into, and interact with, select devices, control panels and droids.” EFE
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