Crash

So what’s the one thing Titanic II has that no Royal Caribbean, Viking Cruises, or Azamara ship can offer? You’re on the Titanic, baby! Recreating the famous voyage of the world’s most notorious ship! Forget the fact that we’re not stopping at a private island with a waterpark, or that you couldn’t get the six-figure Paint Me Like Your French Girls suite, or that your dining room is on the lowest deck and the original kitchen was never meant for this level of service, you’re reliving the movie! Or actual historical event!

Slight problem.

As we recall, over two thirds of the people involved in that original voyage had a very bad night. Well, nobody had a good night, but 730 people had a cold sit in a lifeboat trying to ignore the guilt of knowing what was happening just over yonder, and 1,510 never had the chance to roast the White Star Line on Edwardian Yelp. And that… that’s the thing, that’s the one biggest thing this ship is known for. Luxurious, yes, big, yes for the time, but mostly, doomed. A watery grave for rich and poor alike.

Could you make an experience out of that? Maybe, but not in a ship that actually moves, the wreck-of-the-Titanic experience kind of famously made the ship difficult to flip to welcome new guests for the return trip to England. You would build that in a warehouse on a harbour. Maybe on the Manhattan dock that the Titanic was meant to arrive at, still largely unused to this day. You make a giant walkthrough experience, where forced perspective, lighting tricks, and digital screens make rooms look like an immense ship you’re boarding, or outdoor promenades looking out on the North Atlantic, where you can mingle or enjoy a brandy or snag a timed entrance for the King of The World Photobooth. Then you stop at your cabin before your assigned time to head to the main dining room for your six course dinner, a staff member slips you a note with dessert inviting you to “the real party” down in steerage, where there’s a bar and a band and a dance floor, then back to your cabin but oh no! You need to put on your life vest! Then instead of the cold but kinda dull in recreation experience of getting on a lifeboat in an orderly fashion while the ship’s still mostly above water, the walkthrough takes you to rooms meant to flood, rooms that tilt, gives you an exciting escape from the doomed vessel before a miraculously returning lifeboat takes you away…

You could do that. It is not even vaguely similar to what Throw-Another-Shrimp-On-The Bezos is doing, but you could. Could even make it a multi-day experience if you could find enough activities, but now the warehouse needs to be massive with themed rooms for night one and alternate rooms for night two (if you go back to your original room, it would break immersion), other dining options post-sinking (such as the “I’m Frying, Jack” Burger Stand) and enough fake Titanic to mill around on for 16 hours. No small feat, and, now that we think about it, it’s been tried, hasn’t it?

This is basically, broad strokes, a Titanic themed version of the Star Wars Hotel, isn’t it?

The Galactic Starcruiser, or Star Wars hotel to everyone not drawing paychecks from Disney, was a two-night experience on a fake cruise with digital screens to make it seem like you were on a spaceship, with various activities to do and storylines to follow throughout the day, paid photo ops, and on day two there’s a ship wide emergency to wrap things up. Kinda similar to what I’m describing, and it shows the problems with even this approach. First and foremost, it went out of business in under a year. It would take a seasoned expert in both theme parks and Star Wars about four hours to explain all that went wrong, but the experience was not delivering value equivalent to the price point, so people didn’t go, so it shut down. And part of this is our second problem: Disney cut corners err’where. One droid, no animatronics, a buggy app interfering with the game play, it was a lot of money for a small room and a half-baked experience.

And this is one of the biggest, wealthiest corporations on Earth! Yes, sure, they stay that way by being stingy as hell as of late and that might begin to harm their theme park revenues, even if their flagship parks weren’t in a country making itself actively toxic for international tourism, but the Star Wars hotel was orders of magnitude less complicated than the scenario I just described and it under-delivered and shut down, so what chance does some opal baron from Australia have?

And now, let’s dig a little deeper into one of Clive’s less pleasant statements about the Titanic II’s mission.

Next page: Values, you say