Category — DVC

Disney Resort on O’ahu Scheduled to Open in 2011

Walt Disney Parks and Resorts broke ground for its first family destination resort in Hawai’i today with a traditional Hawaiian blessing ceremony on its 21-acre oceanfront property, located at the Ko Olina Resort & Marina development on the western side of O’ahu. Scheduled to open in 2011, the new family friendly destination will overlook breathtaking crystal blue lagoons and white sand beaches and is planned to include 350 hotel rooms and 480 Disney Vacation Club timeshare villas.

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Disney shares plans for Hawaii resort

For fans of Disney’s theme parks the choice often comes down to a trip to Hawaii or another trip to a Disney theme park. Usually the Disney theme park wins out. Well, starting in 2011 those fans will have to think harder about putting off Hawaii as Disney will have opened its new Oahu island resort.

Disney unveiled a detailed scale model of the resort. It will have two towers, a convention center, a spa, restaurants, and a luxurious garden area with many water features.

The resort will feature 830 rooms, 350 for the hotel and 480 for Disney Vacation Club members and sits on one of Ko Olina’s four man-made lagoons. When it opens it is expected to employ about 1,000 people.

Close up on Pool Detail

Among the many water park type features will be the volcanic caldera which acts as a center piece to the area. A tube slide will take swimmers down an adventurous water course with rapids, a bubbling pool, some special effects and a plenty of surprising elements. Children will enjoy an aquatic play structure.

For the more adventurous a saltwater snorkeling lagoon will feature native fish and some other elements of Disney magic.

Most of the news reports question Disney going ahead with this plan despite the softening economy, but I think that by the time they open in 2011, the economy should be on the road to recovery and Disney will be positioned to take advantage of that with the latest resort to open on the Islands.

What do you think? Is this a good move for the mouse? I have to say that I’m going to start a second penny jar just to save money for a trip.

Of course, my last post before I go to sleep is about Disney’s secrecy re: the nearely completed Bay Lake Towers. Then when I wake up the Orlando Sentinel is proclaiming that Disney is finally ready to announce both Bay Lake Towers and the Treehouse DVC Villas. Just my luck.

“What we’re trying to do, particularly with the resorts that we build on site [at Walt Disney World], is really provide something that’s unique, something that you can’t get any other place in Central Florida — and, really, in the world,” said Jim Lewis, president of Disney Vacation Club. “With these two resorts, we believe we’ve done that.”

Of course, Disney will also command a premium for the two locations that are sure to be in high demand once made available.

If you’re thinking of buying into the Disney Vacation Club, but don’t like the idea of waking up to animals outside your window at the Animal Kingdom Lodge Villas (I’m sure there’s one or two of you out there), then you might want to head on over to DVCNews.com and check out the newly revealed plans for Bay Lake Tower at Disney’s Contemporary Villas. A name which, by the way, implies there will be future DVC towers at the Contemporary. Chew on that for a while.

Sure, it’s not even officially announced yet, but that hasn’t stopped Disney from building it. And where there is construction, there are construction permits. DVCNews scoops up those filings and posts some revealing details of just what a future DVC owner might get when buying into this Magic Kingdom adjacent vacation club property. Ladies and gentlemen, get your checkbooks ready.

I like the fact that there will be Bocce Ball and Shuffle Board courts. I think Bay Lake Towers might be taking that ‘retirement home’ theming just a bit too far.

Thanks to Blue Sky Disney for pointing out this photo album of the newest Disney Hotel in the world. It’s the Toyko Disneyland Hotel and it opens on Tuesday. It’s an absolutely beautiful hotel full of the sort of amazing detail that will make your stay all the more magical.

Stateside Disney fans have long been jealous of the money that is lavished on the Disney theme parks and properties owned by the Oriental Land Company. Of late, we’ve also been made jealous by the enormous expenditure on architecture, urban planning, and theme parks in Dubai, a whole crafted city in the United Arab Emirates.

Why is there no such development like this in the Orlando area so we may compete just a bit with overseas competition for tourist dollars? TDL gets that amazing hotel and we get Sarasota Springs. There just is no comparison.

There are plenty of differences between the way Oriental Land Company runs their Disney parks and resorts. Some of them probably wouldn’t fly here in the US. For instance, cast members don’t get free admission to the theme parks. You probably wouldn’t be able to hire or keep any part-timers without those perks.

There are also, admittedly, a difference in the amount of money guests are willing to spend one their Disney vacation. It’s higher by a significant amount in Japan and the demand is nearly as high as ever. But the cost of oil is adding a new element to the tourism equation.

That makes me wonder again about Disney’s USA based parks. Disney fans and Annual Passholders don’t hang me for suggesting this, but perhaps the US based Disney Parks could do better by tremendously elevating the quality of service, resort destinations, and themepark attractions to match and even surpass what OLC has been planning (WDI created the attractions and resorts for OLC, so they have the plans handy). Then raise the prices for resorts and parks to match. Keep raising prices until attendance levels out at a pleasantly crowded level, but not so much you have to wait in super long lines for anything.

Disney World would have to demolish and start again with almost all of the hotels. The Grand Floridian and Animal Kingdom Lodge (perhaps Wilderness Lodge as well) could be kept, but the rest would have to receive serious upgrades. Don’t want to get rid of the moderate hotels? convert them into DVC. DVC would become even more valuable, but without cheap annual passes, admission costs would affect how often DVC members could attend.

Disneyland could keep the Grand Californian Hotel and they need to replace the other two shortly anyway. I would expand Downtown Disney into where the Disneyland Hotel is now and build a brand new Disneyland Hotel of the quality seen in Tokyo Disneyland on the other side of the Esplanade between Disneyland and California Adventure with private entrances to both parks. Paradise Pier hotel could be recreated in the Lion King parking lot with it’s own beach and water feature and a seaside look and feel.

If Disney wanted to throw a bone the locals, they could keep California Adventure and Disney’s Hollywood Studios as the ‘locals’ parks with lower costs annual passes available to residents in nearby zip codes. But trips to the Magic Kingdoms, EPCOT, and Animal Kingdom would become special with DAK having more and more elements of a boutique park where guests could pay more for animal and adventure experiences.

Here’s what I think caps this idea as the best plan for Disney. The price of oil will eventually, sooner rather than later most likely, surpass the $160 a barrel mark where supposedly Disney’s own studies show it makes sense to sell the parks (I’m not sure I follow or agree with that logic). If a company like OLC, perhaps even OLC, buys the parks & resort operations, they will very likely follow a plan just as I’ve outlined above.

Disney’s plan up to now appears to be to build a Disney property (either a theme park or location based resort (think Hawaii hotel) near every major population density in the world. If they continue that path, look for a new Disney theme park in Dubai. But there are other ways to compete in the world market other than spreading yourself thin.

OLC realizes that in order to compete in the new world market of tourism, where you can attract those who can afford to travel, you have to really dazzle them with Disney magic. Will Disney get that today? Disney could use this downturn in visitor volume to retool the parks and resorts and come out the other side with a product that is competitive on what is now a world market for tourism travel. Dubai is following the “if you build it they will come” model; Disney has used it in the past during economic slow times, but will they do so again with the new regime in charge?

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Originally labeled “Kingdom Towers” in paperwork filed with the county, Disney has now changed the name of its as-yet unannounced next Disney Vacation Club resort to “Bay Lake Towers.” Considering the towers sit on the edge of “Bay Lake” that certainly seems fitting.

If you ask me, “Bay Lake Towers” sounds something a little like one of those retirement communities Florida is so well known for. Why not call it “Contemporary DVC” since that what everyone else will call it? After all you have the Wilderness Lodge Villas, Animal Kingdom Lodge Villas, why the change here?

(Via Orlando Sentinel)

For some reason, Disney’s normally enthusiastic, extensive publicity machine is keeping quiet on this announcement in a Russian news source:

Disneyland will be built in Krasnoyarsk by 2012. It was announced by Krasnoyarsk deputy mayor Anatoly Grigorenko at the news conference on October 30. Grigorenko said it was planned to build the children park in the area of Northern Highway, which held much promise for construction.

The investor of the project is a Moscow company, Grigorenko reported. "It will be a big children entertainment center with side-shows and merry-go-rounds under one roof," Anatoly Grigorenko noted.

Construction of Disneyland is expected to start next year and last for three years.