ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — When Walt Disney World opened half a century ago, the resort boasted just two hotels on its property. Today, there are more than 30.
Hotels, while a necessity for guests, were not the focus of the new theme park.
“At opening, U.S. Steel ran the hotels. Disney didn’t run hotels, they wanted somebody else to run them,” says former cast member Duncan Dickson.
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Those two hotels, Disney’s Contemporary Resort and Disney’s Polynesian Village Resort, both opened in 1971, and for more than a decade, were the only Disney hotels on the property.
“Back then, many of us were asking, ‘Why don’t we build more hotels?’ and the word from the top, from Donn Tatum and Card Walker, was that we had to give the cities time to catch up; we need the rest of the community to build,” said Dickson.
“They didn’t have the funding,” notes Disney historian Rick Foglesong. “The Disney company didn’t have the funding to build everything that they would need, they only built two hotels.”
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But as Disney had learned in California, the market would respond. Since Disney mostly relied on tourists driving to Orlando from outside of Central Florida, in a matter of years hotels began to pop up on the major roads leading to and from Walt Disney World.
All of that would start to change in the mid-1980s.
Two years after EPCOT opened its gates, Michael Eisner took over as the head of the company and was quickly tasked with a mission to expand. Eisner started looking at Disney’s property, trying to find land not to use for a theme park, but rather hotel space. Soon the EPCOT Resort area was built, adding more hotel rooms to serve the Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, and the soon-to-open Disney’s MGM Studios, now Hollywood Studios.
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“When that happened, that fundamentally changed the Disney company’s interest in their property,” says Foglesong. “Before, they didn’t mind people going off-property to stay in hotels, but with those hotels there, started to become what’s known as ‘The Disney Bubble,’ where the Disney company has the desire and ability to keep people in the bubble.”
Today, Disney is one of the largest hotel owners in the area, with dozens of hotels as well as villas and campgrounds. Even the original two hotels have seen expansions over the years, with Disney currently planning even more expansions in the years to come.
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