Disney’s Star Wars hotel Galactic Starcruiser was torpedoed by bad app design

polygon.com:

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 longform 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 video’s two-hour mark.

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 first-hand account of the full experience as well as anecdotal reports from dozens of other guests posted on social media, 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