I’m only an hour into this person’s 4 hour(!) review/criticism of the Star Wars hotel and am baffled at how poorly this was handled.
I think the interesting thing about this video is that she is the perfect customer for the experience disney tried to set up. She loves themeparks, she loves dressing up as characters, she loves larping, she loves star wars. But no matter how much effort SHE put in to get her enjoyment out of it, it just didn’t work.
I’ve watched the whole thing. It’s so close to something I’d really like, at least in concept. But the ball is dropped so hard in crucial areas :(
Interestingly there are some videos that show what it’s like when it does work and it’s amazing (though still probably not worth thousands of dollars). That makes it even more frustrating when it doesn’t. It’s been a while since I watched Jenny‘s video but I think she made a point of that near the end.
The hotel was so expensive in both development and upkeep that they had to have a high price and high capacity at the same time to still make a profit. In the end it was basically luck if the actors had time to interact with you and if they didn’t, you had to rely on the rather barebones automated stuff while still paying for the full experience.
I saw someone below say “it’s a review of a hotel”. It’s so much more than that.
It’s a critical indictment of corporate greed, and the fleecing of family entertainment, and nerd culture, told in such minute and well research detail, it’s a 4 hour wonder. All of her stuff is like this.
She’s a little Forrest gnome with an Einstein brain who graces us with her content. I’m a big big Jenny Nicholson fan.
I watched that video when it came out, it’s a delight! I also feel so bad for Jenny about like…everything that happened. So bad! So expensive!
Was there some fallout from this video? Or do you just mean the terrible experience she had at the hotel?
Just the entire hotel experience was so bad! I do think some people were complaining about the video, but I mostly didn’t see it, only saw people loving the video!
I can’t imagine spending that much and having that bad an experience. I think my heart would just explode from stress and sadness.
This concept should’ve been a slam dunk, and they blew it.
It seems like they developed the entire thing in a silo without ever considering how people would actually want to spend their time on holiday. It sounds incredibly appealing on the surface, and aimed directly at my (and my partner’s) demographic, but they just screwed the pooch at every corner.
My take was that they were pulled very hard in two directions: the initial idea was to appeal to the hardcore fan who would love nothing more than to drop thousands of dollars to have an immersive Star Wars experience, and it was see-saw’d by the desire to also appeal to the classic Disney market of families with children. Inevitable result: you get something that satisfies neither group.
It also sounds like the cost shock set in at some point and the vision was scaled back.
I’m still watching, but it feels like they didn’t bring in people from their parks, hotels, and cruise ships to consult or manage taking the concept from design to execution.
Jenny Nicholson has over 53k monthly Patreon subscribers, paying at least $2 a month, some up to $25 (do that math, it’s astounding). She’s the 7th largest Patreon subscriber base on the platform. She’s well exceeded anything Ralph Nader has ever done, professionally.
This may be the dumbest thing I’ve ever read. While I like her content it’s about theme parks and cartoons. Nader helped get us safer cars, safer work places, safer water, FOIA, and 9/11 + 2 major decades long wars. When Jenny’s career leads us to trillions of spending attacking countries that weren’t actually responsible for attacking us she can say she’s on Nader’s level.
