Can you tell us about what’s new at Disney resorts for meeting and event planners?
We’re excited about reinvesting in the meetings segment. We are just completing a multi-year, multimillion-dollar reimagination of the Grand Floridian Resort in the heart of the Magic Kingdom. The final piece of the puzzle was the convention center. We closed it for three months this year and just opened it last week, and it is stunning. We are still going with the Victorian theme, and it’s light, airy and rich in palette, really elevating our flagship property to exactly where it should be. At 40,000 square feet, it’s the perfect size resort for a leadership meeting or incentives—we do a lot of high-end meetings there.
On the other end of the spectrum is our largest convention resort, Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort, with 229,000 square feet and about 2,500 rooms. About five years ago, we brought out the Grand Escena Tower, the crown jewel of that resort, at the request of our meetings clients. What became very apparent after the last five years is that the rest of our largest convention resort needed to be as stunning as that tower. We’re excited to say that we are going to reimagine the convention space from that tower all the way to the convention center in late 2026 through 2027. While still respecting the storyline of that collection of Spanish, Southwestern, and Mexican cultures, we’re going to elevate the convention center away from the very bright colors into a more sophisticated palette.
How do you help meetings clients tap into creativity?
Everybody talks about being creative, but Disney owns it. We've been doing it since Walt and the Imagineers, and that same creative design process and those principles are what we apply to meetings today. That’s what’s really powerful in combination with some amazing convention products. And that’s where we can elevate and innovate someone’s meeting. We are hearing from our clients again and again that they need engagement, they need experience. Whether they’re being told they have to go to a corporate meeting or they elect to go to an association meeting or an incentive meeting, attendees want to walk away feeling different, experiencing something they haven’t experienced, feeling their time was worth it because they engaged. That’s what we’ve been doing for years and years. We call it return on experience. We want event attendees to feel different when they leave—not just to understand what their sales goals are or what the new product is, but really walk away and say, “Wow, I connected with this person. I left so inspired.” If we did that, then we know we won the day for our clients.
What types of meeting segments are you seeing right now?
Market segments like insurance, technology, medical and financial have a high affinity for what we bring to the table. And that’s whether it’s the corporate market or the association market. We do very well with incentives. People are really choosy about how they spend their time, especially post-pandemic. Disney profiles really well for people who win an incentive, worked all year to get there, have choices where to go and choose to go with their family.
What are booking windows looking like at this point?
Since the pandemic, they have definitely been shorter. One thing I would say, and I look at this all the time as a leader of our meetings and conventions team, I’m actually starting to see a little bit of lengthening now. The association market is definitely starting to get back out. Corporate’s still pretty short term, but I am finding those that are about 1,000 rooms and up that must have a meeting every year are starting to go out two years or so because they need the dates and they need the space. It’s a nice thing to see. It’s still shorter than any of us would like. In some ways it’s great when you need short-term, but I am starting to see a lengthening too, which is good. We all need that. It’s good for the industry.
Why do you consider the Disney Creative Studio a differentiator?
There’s no other hotel company that has this or really other entertainment company. It’s a true physical studio that you can go to where you can touch and feel, and we will share our creative thought process and all the different resources we can bring to you to tell your story—it could be entertainment, it could be floral, it could be culinary. We take our clients there and walk them through how this can benefit them. And they get to then go and talk to these different people and touch and feel and see some of it. This helps us showcase to them what the possibilities could be for the meeting. Some people say, “That sounds great, but we can’t afford that.” But we can give you innovation and creativity for one part of your meeting or we can do your entire meeting. You always have some type of budget to elevate your meeting, and we respect that. We bring our resources together in a way that will help you elevate but will not break your budget. The other thing we’ll sometimes offer is a room we call the Creative Lab, where a client can bring their team over and maybe have a creative session, just innovate. If you talk to our creative team, they will tell you that you have to practice being creative and you have to put a little process behind it. And that’s what we do so well because we’ve been doing it for like 100 years. That’s where we live.
Let’s talk about the basics. How do you ensure the underpinnings of events are buttoned up and consistent across the board?
We have design principles that are built off of the way that Walt and the Imagineers have been designing experiences forever. Each member of what we call our value chain—or everyone who’s a Disney event architect, whether it’s a chef, a banquet event manager, my event services manager, me selling—understands what those core principles are. And then as we work with a specific client, we actually go throughout our own value chain. All those different teams say, “This is how we’re applying them to this client.” We understand that if everyone doesn’t understand and adhere to the same principles, and if we all haven’t listened to the heart of the client and shared that again and again and again, then you’re not going to get what you wanted. That elevated experience is what makes us different. You can’t get that when you’re working with five or six different venues. That’s who we are. That’s our DNA.
