Jim Hill
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Maybe you saw the mailer that was stuffed in this month's bill from the Disney Credit card.

Or perhaps you saw that article in the latest "Disney Magazine."

Either way, it's pretty obvious that Mickey has begun beating the drum for the company's newest hotel in Florida -- Disney's Pop Century Resort. Phase One of this 5760 room resort will open this coming December. Which is why the Mouse is putting out the word now -- just in case you have a hankering to spend this coming holiday season in the shadow of a three story Rubiks' Cube.

Disney's Pop Century Resort under construction

When most people talk about this soon-to-be-opening resort, some remark on the hotel's clever choice of theming (A hotel that celebrates the biggest toys, fads, catch phrases and dance crazes of the 20th Century? This place is going to have big-time appeal to baby boomers). Others are more excited about Pop Century's competitive room rates (Starting at just $77 a night during value season). Me? I'm just amazed that Disney's been able to keep its WDW building boom going for so long.

I mean, think about it, folks: When Disney CEO Michael Eisner and his new management team came on board at Walt Disney Productions back in September 1984, there were fewer than 5500 hotel rooms on property for WDW guests to stay in. (And -- of those 5500 rooms -- fewer than 3900 were actually owned by the Mouse. The rest were operated by outside hotel chains at the outermost edge of Disney property -- the Hotel Plaza area near the Shopping Village at Lake Buena Vista.) In just 10 years, Disney managed to triple the number of hotel rooms the Mouse owned and operated in the Orlando area.

And this on-property WDW hotel building boom continues even today. When Phase Two of “Pop Century“ opens in late 2002/early 2003, the Walt Disney Company will have over 33,000 rooms available for folks wishing to stay at WDW. Amazingly, these hotels -- year in, year out -- allegedly maintain a 90% occupancy rate (20% higher than even the most popular off-property Orlando area hotels) and over 29,000 of this rooms are owned directly by the Walt Disney Company. Understandably, this “room boom“ creates an incredible stream of revenue for the Mouse.

Mind you, this WDW building spree didn’t exactly start smoothly. When Eisner took charge in 1984, he discovered that the company’s previous chairman, Ray Watson, had cut a deal with Tishman Construction Company (the New York based construction company that had built much of EPCOT Center). Under the terms of that deal, Tishman had the right to build two new huge hotels on WDW property. When Eisner asked the company’s lawyers to try and break that deal, Tishman responded by threatening to sue Disney for $1.5 billion.

The Swan, and the Dolphin in the background on the right -
Two of the hotels not owned by Disney

Rather than get caught up in a costly court fight, Eisner opted to honor Watson’s deal with Tishman -- but with a few conditions. Chief among these was that Disney wanted final approval of the look and design of the new hotels. Tishman conceded this point -- which began Michael Eisner’s career as the patron saint of entertainment architecture.

Over the past 16 years, Eisner has personally okayed the construction of various WDW hotel complexes and professional buildings. Some are decidedly odd (Arata Isozaki’s Team Disney building ), while others have been flat out wonderful (Peter Dominick's Wilderness Lodge). Of course, to insure that all of these structures met with his notoriously high standards, Eisner decided to create a whole new arm of the Walt Disney Company that would just to handle all of the Mouse’s property development -- the Disney Development Company.