Walt Disney Parks and Resorts

Walt Disney Parks and Resorts

Walt Disney Parks and Resorts is the segment of The Walt Disney Company that conceives, builds, and manages the company's theme parks and holiday resorts, as well as a variety of additional family-oriented leisure enterprises. It is one of four major business segments of the company, the other three being Consumer Products, Media Networks, and Studio Entertainment.

The Parks and Resorts division was founded in 1971 as Walt Disney Attractions when Disney's second theme park, the Magic Kingdom at the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida, opened, joining the original Disneyland in California.


Disneyland Resort

In 2001, the area was officially named the Disneyland Resort with the opening of Disney's California Adventure Park, two new resort hotels and the Downtown Disney retail, dining and entertainment district. The resort occupies 500 acres, listed below, and are divided into parks, shopping centers, and resorts:

Parks:
Disneyland
Disney's California Adventure Park

Shopping centers:
Downtown Disney

Resorts:
Disneyland Hotel
Disney's Grand Californian Hotel & Spa
Disney's Paradise Pier Hotel

Walt Disney World Resort

The Walt Disney World Resort opened Oct. 1, 1971, with the Magic Kingdom (similar in layout to Disneyland) and three resort hotels in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. The property is twice the size of Manhattan, with about a quarter of it having been developed to date. It has become the most popular tourist destination on Earth, with four theme parks, two water parks, a shopping and entertainment complex, 20 resort hotels and eight golf courses. The resort is divided into parks, shopping centers, and resorts:

Parks:
Magic Kingdom
Epcot
Disney's Hollywood Studios
Disney's Animal Kingdom
Disney's Blizzard Beach
Disney's Typhoon Lagoon
Disney's Wide World of Sports

Shopping centers:
Downtown Disney

Resorts:
Disney's Animal Kingdom Lodge
Disney's Grand Floridian Resort & Spa
Disney's Contemporary Resort
Disney's Polynesian Resort
Disney's Port Orleans Resort
Disney's Saratoga Springs Resort & Spa
Disney's Old Key West Resort
Disney's Caribbean Beach Resort
Disney's BoardWalk Resort
Disney's Beach Club Resort
Disney's Yacht Club Resort
Disney's Coronado Springs Resort
Disney's Pop Century Resort
Disney's All-Star Movies Resort
Disney's All-Star Music Resort
Disney's All-Star Sports Resort
Disney's Wilderness Lodge
Disney's Fort Wilderness Resort & Campground

Tokyo Disney Resort

Tokyo Disney Resort, located in Urayasu, Chiba, Japan, opened April 15, 1983. On Sept. 4, 2001, the resort expanded with Tokyo DisneySea. There are several resort hotels on site, but only three are actually owned by the resort, which boasts the largest parking structure in the world. Tokyo Disney Resort is fully owned and operated by The Oriental Land Company and is licensed by the Walt Disney Company. Its properties, listed below, are divided into parks, shopping centers, and resorts:

Parks:
Tokyo Disneyland
Tokyo DisneySea

Shopping centers:
Ikspiari shopping, dining and entertainment complex

Resorts:
Disney's Ambassador Hotel
Tokyo DisneySea Hotel MiraCosta
Tokyo Disneyland Hotel


Disneyland Resort Paris

Disneyland Resort Paris, Disney's second resort complex outside the United States, opened April 12, 1992, as Euro Disney Resort. Located in Marne-la-Vallée in the suburbs of Paris, France, it features two theme parks and a golf course, an entertainment complex and six Disney resort hotels. It is maintained and managed by Euro Disney S.C.A., a company partially owned by the Walt Disney Company whose stock is traded on Euronext. Its properties sit on 4,940 acres, listed below, and are divided into parks, shopping centers, and resorts:

Parks:
Disneyland Park
Walt Disney Studios Park
Golf Disneyland

Shopping centers:
Disney Village

Resorts:
Disneyland Hotel
Disney's Hotel New York
Disney's Newport Bay Club
Disney's Sequoia Lodge
Disney's Hotel Cheyenne
Disney's Hotel Santa Fe
Disney's Davy Crockett Ranch

Hong Kong Disneyland Resort

Hong Kong Disneyland, Disney's fifth resort and its second in Asia, opened Sept. 12, 2005. The resort is located in Penny's Bay, Lantau Island. Currently, the resort consists of one theme park and two hotels, with land reserved for future expansion. It is owned and operated by Hong Kong International Theme Parks, an incorporated company jointly owned by The Walt Disney Company and the Government of Hong Kong. Hong Kong Disneyland Resort sits on 310 acres.

Parks:
Hong Kong Disneyland
Inspiration Lake Recreation Centre

Resorts:
Hong Kong Disneyland Hotel
Disney's Hollywood Hotel

Disney Cruise Line

Though it is part of the Walt Disney World Resort venture, Disney Cruise Line is an altogether separate branch of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts. Disney Cruise Line was formed in 1995; its two ships, the Disney Magic and Disney Wonder, began operation in 1998 and 1999, respectively, and were designed in collaboration with Walt Disney Imagineering. Both ships offer three-, four- and seven-night Caribbean cruises, each with a stop at Disney's private island in the Bahamas, Castaway Cay. The Disney Magic temporarily relocated to Los Angeles in 2005 to offer cruises along the Mexican Riviera in coordination with the 50th anniversary of Disneyland, and the ship will return to the West Coast in 2008 for similar itineraries. The Magic also offered several cruises in the Mediterranean in 2007.

Properties:
Disney Wonder
Disney Magic
Castaway Cay

Other ventures

ESPN Zone, a chain of sports-themed restaurants operated by Disney Regional Entertainment.

Club Disney, a now-closed chain of children's entertainment centers developed by Disney Regional Entertainment.

DisneyQuest, an indoor arcade with traditional video games and virtual reality experiences, initially developed and managed by Disney Regional Entertainment.

Three World of Disney retail stores managed by the Parks and Resorts merchandise division.

Disney Vacation Club, a timeshare program that includes several themed resorts within Walt Disney World Resort plus Disney's Hilton Head Island Resort and Disney's Vero Beach Resort.

Adventures by Disney, a program of all-inclusive, guided vacation tour packages offered at predominantly non-Disney sites around the world.

Abandoned concepts
Disney reportedly had plans to build a park named Disney's America. The park was to have been located in Haymarket, Virginia, but local opposition to the idea appears to have persuaded Disney not to go forward with it in 1994.

Before Disney's California Adventure, Disney originally had announced plans for a West Coast version of Epcot, WestCOT, which was deemed too ambitious after the rocky financial performance of Euro Disney in France as well as protests by residents of Anaheim. Another concept for a Disney park in California was Disneysea, a contrasting park to Disneyland, to be built in Long Beach next to the RMS Queen Mary which Disney owned at the time. The park was to have led to a permanent West Coast ship in the Disney Cruise Line, which would dock at the park. The concept, although quickly scrapped, inspired the Imagineers to create Tokyo DisneySea, which has recently been deemed the second best-loved Disney park in the world, after Disneyland.

Disney-MGM Studios Europe was intended to be a European copy of the Disney-MGM Studios theme park in Florida, to have opened in 1996 at the Euro Disney Resort Paris (now Disneyland Resort Paris). Imagineers had been working on plans for six months before they were told to stop by management after the resort was drastically underperforming financially. The Walt Disney Studios Park opened in 2002 after the resort started to make a profit, though was ultimately very different from the original plans for Disney-MGM Studios Europe.

Future properties
Disney has made no announcements regarding plans for another American theme park and CEO Robert Iger frequently has cited international expansion as one of the company's three strategic priorities.

Both Hong Kong Disneyland Resort and Disneyland Resort Paris have room for future expansion. Scouts are looking for a suitable site for a Disney resort on mainland China in addition to the Disney resort in Hong Kong, possibly near Shanghai. Disney has announced that there will be no new resort on the Chinese mainland before 2010.

On 21 January 2008, Bill Ernest, the managing director of Hong Kong Disneyland, said the Walt Disney Company is not in talks on opening a park in Shanghai nor in any other Asian cities and the company is fully focusing on the Hong Kong park

The only site that is extremely short on land is Disneyland Resort in California. Although the company has acquired enough real estate to build a potential third theme park on a former strawberry farm near the existing resort, Robert Iger has stated that the company's focus in Anaheim is to improve its second park, Disney's California Adventure, before building a third. The strawberry fields were purchased in 2004 for $99.9 million with a requirement to harvest them for at least five years. The remainder of the original Disneyland parking lot, southeast of Disney's California Adventure, was designated as a future growth space for the park. Since the park's opening in 2001, three small projects have been built into that space (a bug's land, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, and a backstage warehouse) while a third, much larger project known as Cars Land is planned to be built into that space in the coming years.

While many foreign governments have made statements to the media that they have been in discussions with Disney to open a new resort, Disney frequently denies such statements.

In October 2007, Disney announced plans to build a resort at Ko Olina Resort & Marina in Kapolei, Hawaii, featuring both a hotel and Disney Vacation Club timeshare units. Scheduled to open in 2011, the 800-unit property will join the other resorts not associated with a theme park, such as Disney's Hilton Head Island Resort in South Carolina.


Timeline

1954 Plans for the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California, are released to the public

1955 Disneyland is dedicated by company founder and namesake Walt Disney on July 17

1965 Plans for the Florida Project (what would become Walt Disney World Resort) are released to the public in November

1966 Walt Disney dies on December 15

1967 Construction on Walt Disney World Resort begins.

1971 - The Magic Kingdom opens on October 1 and is dedicated soon after by Roy O. Disney; Walt Disney World Resort begins operation with two resort hotels and a campground.

1972 - Plans to build a theme park in Europe are released to the public.

1978 - Plans for a second theme park in Walt Disney World Resort (Epcot) are released to the public.

1979 - Construction begins on Epcot.

1982 - The second Walt Disney World theme park, Epcot Center opens on October 1.

1983 - The first international Disney theme park, Tokyo Disneyland, opens in Urayasu, Japan.

1984 - Michael Eisner is named Disney's CEO and soon begins an aggressive expansion of Disney's theme parks division.

1985 - Disney began a licensing agreement with MGM, giving Disney the right to use the MGM name and logo for the third park at Walt Disney World Resort.

1988 - Construction on Euro Disneyland Resort begins.

1989 - The third theme park at Walt Disney World Resort, Disney-MGM Studios, opens on May 1.

1990 - Escape Euro Disneyland opens to show the public what's being constructed in Euro Disneyland.

1992 - The second international Disney theme park, Euro Disneyland opens in Marne-la-Vallée, France on April 12

1995 - Disney announces plans for Disney's Animal Kingdom, the fourth Walt Disney World theme park

1997 - Disney announces Disney's California Adventure and Downtown Disney at the Disneyland Resort

1998 - Disney announces a five-year plan to open a new theme park at each of its resorts across the globe, beginning with the opening of Disney's Animal Kingdom on April 22; the Disney Magic begins operation on July 8

1999 - Plans are announced for a theme park in Hong Kong; the Disney Wonder cruise ship begins operation on August 15

2001 - Disney's California Adventure and Downtown Disney open at Disneyland Resort; Tokyo DisneySea opens at Tokyo Disney Resort

2002 - Walt Disney Studios Park opens as the second theme park in France

2003 - Construction on Hong Kong Disneyland begins.

2005 - Disneyland celebrates its 50th anniversary as part of a worldwide jubilee among all Disney's theme parks worldwide; Hong Kong Disneyland Resort opens September 12 on Hong Kong's Lantau Island; Walt Disney World announces that River Country would remain closed permanently

2006 - The Happiest Homecoming on Earth as well as the Happiest Celebration on Earth ends, and immediately the Year of a Million Dreams promotional period at the Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resorts begins

2007 - The Year of a Million Dreams promotion is extended another year; A 1 billion dollar expansion/renovation of Disney's California Adventure is announced to be completed by 2012. Disneyland Resort Paris celebrates its 15th anniversary.

2008 - Disneyland Resort Paris' 15th Birthday is extended and Tokyo Disney Resort] celebrates its 25th anniversary. Disney-MGM Studios at Walt Disney World is renamed Disney's Hollywood Studios.

2009 - What Will You Celebrate? promotion at Disneyland and Walt Disney World.