Photo: Joel Cunningham
So you want to take a vacation in space. Unless you are Elon Musk, extremely rich, or both, your only option is to settle for the next best thing: a trip onboard Disney World’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, a two-day immersive hotel/theme park experience that transports you into the middle of the sci-fi action in a galaxy far, far away. (You’re still going to need to be pretty rich though.)
I recently got the chance to attend a special media preview of the Galactic Starcruiser on Disney’s dime—the company paid for airfare and accommodations for myself and my family, including all of our meals and theme park admissions. (If you get a chance to attend for free, I highly recommend it.) Now that the hotel has opened to the public, you might be wondering if it’s worth booking your own voyage, so read on to discover everything you need to know before you go. Into space.
What exactly is Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser?
Photo: Joel Cunningham
To paraphrase one Homer Simpson, it’s not quite a hotel, and it’s not quite a theme park, but man. The Los Angeles Times called it a “live-in theme park,” which is accurate, if potentially misleading. (And the paper’s claim that it may also “change how we vacation,” I find more dubious).
In short: The Galactic Starcruiser is a hotel designed to make guests feel like they are inside of a Star Wars movie. The decor has been painstakingly designed to look like a real-life version of the films. There are no windows to remind you you’re in sunny Florida; instead, 3D view screens look out onto “space.” Every Disney cast member working on the ship appears in costume, and will only speak to you in character as a crew member of an intergalactic spaceship. Even entering the “ship” requires you to take a “transport,” actually an oversized elevator that “flies” you from a grim-looking “spaceport” and deposits you into the Atrium of the Halcyon, a 275-year-old luxury starcruiser. (It’s a real Wizard of Oz moment.)
Your vacation will be about more than just lounging in luxury like one of the Coruscant elite. To quote myself:
“Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser is...a two-night hotel stay combined with a two day Star Wars LARP (that’s Live Action Role Playing, for those not caught up with your immersive-experience lingo). You are a guest onboard the luxury starship Halcyon, a passenger ship celebrating its 275th year in space (which appears to fall somewhere between the end of The Last Jedi and the start of The Rise of Skywalker, much like its predecessor at the Disney Parks, Galaxy’s Edge). Think of it like the QE2, but with more droids. You’re there to relax, take advantage of the shipboard amenities, enjoy some fine food, and be serenaded at dinner by a galactic pop superstar (kinda like Cher, if Cher was a Twi’lek). Unfortunately, your peaceful journey is interrupted by a visit from the First Order, investigating rumors of Resistance activity onboard.
Across two nights, you’ll be both an observer to and a participant in the narrative that unfolds from there, and get to know a colorful cast of new but familiar Star Wars archetype characters along the way (which isn’t to say appearances by more familiar faces is out of the question; Disney owns the rights to all of them, after all).”
How much does Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser cost (and what do you get for it)?
Photo: Joel Cunningham
A lot. It costs a lot.
A two-night booking for two guests will run you around $1,200 per night. Each. That’s a total of $4,800 Earth credits. The daily rate drops a bit with the addition of a third passenger, to $889 per night ($5,300 total). If you are unfortunate enough to be a couple with two children to pay for, the stay is going to run you a total of $6,000—or just $750 per night, per person.
What do you get for your money? On the bright side, for that rate, the trip is more or less all-inclusive: Included are your utilitarian but impeccably styled room; all of your meals, including generous breakfast and lunch buffets and two fancy, multi-course dinners (with live entertainment from the galaxy’s hottest tentacled pop star); a day’s admission to Disney’s Hollywood Studios, where you can visit Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge and ride its two most popular rides without waiting in line; and, of course, all the activities that take place onboard the ship (more on that in a minute).
The downside? Alcohol is not included. There are some clever, Star Wars-themed cocktail concoctions on offer from the Halcyon’s lounge—the upscale version of your local hive of scum and villainy—but they’re going to run you around $18 a pop.
What do you actually do during a stay onboard the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser?
Photo: Joel Cunningham
Do your kids ever force you to play pretend with them, and send you running off around the house, yelling at you about plot twists in a narrative you only sort of understand? It’s kind of like that, but with better production values.
The experience is, as stated above, a beginner’s version of Live-Action Role Play. As a guest onboard the ship, you become a character in an action-packed Star Wars narrative that unfolds across two days. When your journey begins, you’ll be given a “datapad” (actually a locked down iPhone 12 mini) with an app that will serve as your itinerary of sorts. It houses your schedule, as well as guided “messages” from various characters you’ll meet onboard, from the headstrong cruise director, to the stoic ship’s captain, to a sneaky First Order officer looking to root out members of the Resistance.
How you respond to these character’s questions will shape what activities are placed on your to-do list. You can choose to side with the good guys, in which case you’ll be give “missions” to help distract the stormtroopers so they don’t spot a heroic, hairy Wookie stowaway, or you can leak intelligence to the First Order. Or maybe you’d rather play both sides, you rogue?
Whatever path you choose, you’ll be doing a lot of the same things: Missions usually involve wandering around the ship and using your datapad to scan QR codes or connect to various Bluetooth signals that will trigger new chats or require you to solve simple puzzles—each mission you complete will deliver you a bit more information about what’s going on in the story.
You’ll also be scheduled for more interactive events that involve the participation of Disney cast members, as well as your fellow guests: working together to repair the ship’s engines by flipping various switches and toggles, or fending off waves of attacking Tie-Fighters.
Should I worry about FOMO onboard the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser?
Given that the narrative branches based on your choices (Disney promises that no two voyages will be the same), you might be worried that you can do the trip “wrong” and miss out on the best parts.
Luckily, that’s not really going to be an issue. As long as you don’t hide out in your room for the entire trip, you’re going to get into the action. Though you obviously won’t get to see how every part of every storyline plays out—you can’t have clandestine meetings with a Jedi Knight when you’ve pledged your allegiance to Supreme Leader Kylo Ren, and vice versa—everyone gets to do basically the same stuff, if in a different context. For example, all guests will eventually get to man the bridge during a space battle, but who you’re shooting at will vary based on your allegiances. Often you’ll simply be walking to grab a bite to eat, only to encounter a gaggle of costumed characters with a bunch of tourists in tow; follow them around to figure out what they are doing, and you’ll soon feel like you’re a part of the story.
Also: Everyone gets to do lightsaber training, and you shouldn’t skip it, even if you feel silly. It’s really fun.
Do I have to dress up?
Photo: Joel Cunningham
This one gets a qualified no—I wore my Earth clothes throughout my stay, and I was treated no different by any of the cast members. But I can’t say being onboard didn’t make me wish I’d at the very least invested in a brown bathrobe before heading to Orlando. The environment is so immersive, it can be jarring to see a bunch of folks wandering around in flip-flops and shorts, even when one of them is you.
Alongside your booking, Disney generously invites you to pre-order exclusive costumes only available to Galactic Starcruiser guests (you can also buy them onboard). They’re of good quality, but also, again, not cheap—an adult Princess Leia dress will run you around $150—so I’d recommend hitting up an online retailer, trolling Etsy, or fashioning your own.
Is the Galactic Starcruiser good for kids?
LARPing sounds like pretending, but it’s more than that, which means the Galactic Starcruiser isn’t strictly for kids; adults willing to lose themselves in the experience will definitely have a good time, even if they aren’t down for taking on a fake persona and backstory.
But is it actually a good experience for kids? Having taken my own elementary school-aged duo, my answer is a qualified yes. The immersive elements of the experience are great fun, but I found my own kids got a bit exhausted by the non-stop pace (a relaxing trip this isn’t—there’s no pool to lounge by, and if you take a nap, you’ll miss most of the fun).
To really enjoy the trip, you need both the spark of imagination to get into the story and the emotional maturity to not get irritated about not getting to do what you want to do at any given moment. While all kids have different tolerance levels for directed fun, I think tweens and up will enjoy it the most. (Also, I’d like to write a strongly worded letter to whoever at Walt Disney Imagineering thought it was a good idea to build the experience around staring at a phone.)
Photo: Joel Cunningham
Is the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser worth the price?
Disney World is always expensive, and this is one of the most expensive things you can do at Disney World. In one sense, it’s a good Disney value, in that you’ll constantly be doing things instead of whisper-screaming at your kids during hour two of standing in like for the Peter Pan ride. But in another, more accurate sense, $6,000 is a lot of money to spend in two days. (Did I mention that doesn’t include your flights?)
For $6,000—including flights!—you could tour a few European cities for a week or more, staying in nice hotels and eating well. You could finally cross that trip to Tokyo off of your bucket list. You could spend an entire month in Costa Rica, chilling on the beach.
It all depends on what you want out of your vacation. Do you want to see the world, or do you want the Disney-fied experience of living inside a Star Wars movie? If you’re willing and able to drop that much cash on the latter, I don’t think you’ll regret the experience.
