Great news to start the week as Hong Kong Disneyland announced today its second most profitable year and that the park will build its third and "biggest" hotel, to open in 2017! The new hotel positioned as "luxury hotel" will be themed around "exotic locations from around the world". It will occupy 6.4 hectares, and will offer 750 rooms with a total of 56000 square meters of floor area plus outdoor exotic adventure area to explore the theme.
It will cost HK$4.26 billion ($550 million) and you have above and below the renderings for this proposed third hotel which looks to me a bit like a mix between Animal Kingdom Lodge and Disney's Hawaii Aulani hotel. The "exotic locations from around the world" theme is also exciting - hey, may be we'll have a kind of "Adventurer's Club" hotel!
The hotel will be built on the land available between Hong Hong Disneyland Hotel and Hong Kong Disneyland Hollywood Hotel and will be the largest at HKDL Resort with 750 rooms and three restaurants as well as what looks like a great outdoor beach / pool area. You'll ask note on the map below that the hotel will be in fact located outside the park but just behind Mystic Manor, or in front of depending if you look from the hotel or from Mystic Manor. The hotel theming around "exotic locations from around the world" couldn't fit better being built so close from Adventureland and Mystic Manor.
You'll note on the map below that, once this third hotel will be built, they'll still have room available for a fourth hotel between this new hotel and the current HKDL Hotel you can see on the artwork below.
If HKDL plans to open its third and largest hotel by early 2017 it's to accommodate an influx of visitors from countries - including China and South Korea - amid intensifying competition from Ocean Park. HKDL has had to contend with government-owned Ocean Park, which drew 7.7 Million visitors in the fiscal year ended June. Ocean Park plans to add a lot of new attractions by 2017 as well as a 495-room hotel. Also, Kim Min-ho, CEO of Hong Kong Disneyland said that he expects Lantau Island hotels to have a strong demand with the opening in 2016 of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao bridge.
Hong Kong Disneyland posted also a profit of HK$242 million, its second annual gain, in the 12 months ended September, more than double the HK$109 million a year ago. Visitors from China to Hong Kong Disneyland, part-owned by the city’s government, jumped 15 percent last year, while those from South Korea surged 27 percent, Hong Kong Disneyland Managing Director Andrew Kam told reporters today. “The hotel expansion will support increasing demand from the booming tourism industry in the region,” Kam said.
Hong Kong Disneyland’s sales rose 15 percent to HK$4.9 billion for the fiscal year, according to the statement. Visitors from China to the former British colony jumped 16.7 percent to 40.8 million last year and accounted for 75 percent of total visitor arrivals, according to the Hong Kong tourism Board.
As for future development for the park the picture above shows where are the lands available for future attractions. The light blue space with black stars on the center right is where Iron Man Experience will be built. And, talking about Iron Man Experience, to open in 2016, i have new details about the ride for you so don't miss too my Iron Man Experience update posted this afternoon HERE.
One more thing: the orange land on the center left available for future expansion, near Grizzly Gulch, is where HKDL Imagineers originally envisioned to build the Pirates of Caribbean land before it was cancelled, as you can see on the picture below.
See you soon for a new HKDL udpate and don't miss the iron Man Experience article HERE.
Artwork: copyright Disney - HKDL
Thanks so much for this great news, this looks very good!!!
ReplyDeleteVery happy to hear the resort is succeeding and expanding.
ReplyDeleteHowever, this is the latest Disney hotel to simply be a box with some appliqué. I miss when they had real architectural details. This seems more like an All Star motel. It's a massive expanse of flat walls. If this was an All Star priced hotel, that would be OK, but it's unfortunate this is what is considered "luxury" level architecture at Disney and elsewhere. Other Disney examples: the DVC club at The Grand Floridian (blank walls that would never have existed in a building from the turn of the 20th century), Aulani (those buildings are very plain, even as they tried to spruce them up with faux wood columns and arches), and I'm sure we will see another poorly designed building on the shores of the Polynesian soon.
I'm sure these will all be nice buildings inside, it's just sad to see the change in building design in the Iger-era (it's all about the function/profit margin) vs. the Eisner era (say what you will about Eisner, he loved to work with fine architects and it shows).
Yes, but Eisner has always been a "wannabe" architect. That's why he asked famous architects to build hotels for Disney, it was his way to be an architect through the works of others, if i can say. Unfortunately his love for architecture also had a disaster effect on Disneyland Paris as it is one of the reason why they've built too many hotels at the start, back in 1992... and the start of financial problems for DLP ( as at that time the hotels were not full all year long as they are now ).
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