The use of stone and tiling in the finishes was appropriate, and the quality of materials and finishes was very high. Attention to detail was evident throughout, with high quality joinery work and lighting complimenting and enhancing a high quality interior, matched by high quality service and the best chocolate sauce I have had in any hotel anywhere, bar none. Yet there was a feeling of some incoherence, a lack of integration of the lobby seating for example, with the fantasy the statuary represented. Where was the medieval banquet on offer in the food operation? Only the bar area with its painted timber roof moved towards the imaginative. It was almost as if the Disney ability to weave spells had not reached the Movenpick estates department – perhaps someone should sprinkle them with stardust. In Disney itself there was a marriage between the architecture and the intention. The architecture complimented and reinforced the fantasy that is at the root of the experience. Externally the architecture of the Movenpick Dream Castle works for the fantasy, but internally most of the public spaces failed to work and contribute to the fantastical in the same way that Disney’s architecture did. Perhaps more Imagineering was needed in the approach to the building, and perhaps a little less of the traditional hotel?

Footnote:

The writer travelled by Eurostar from Waterloo. Quite apart from the unbelieveable news that the struggling Channel Tunnel organisation is to vacate Waterloo completely when the north London terminus is ready, or the even more incredible suggestion by Britains misnamed Ministry of Transport (Ministry of Inertia might be better)that the Eurostar terminal should perhaps become a shopping Mall rather than being used to relieve the pressure on the main station, the congestion was amazing. When asked, a Eurostar representative said that the changing nature of tourism was causing some problems. The increase of package tours from increasingly wealthy areas outside the historic originator countries of tourists was bringing in people who were unfamiliar with automated ticketing systems or escalators. The company was having problems with people not wanting to descend by escalator to the ticketing area, then having to be helped through the automatic ticket machines to reach their trains. Instead of speeding up passenger throughput the automatic machines were actually slowing it down, causing the congestion.

There may be a lesson here for other attactions on the mass tourist route. Maybe the operational criteria needs to be re-appraised to take account of the increasing cultural diversity of arriving tourists, which will challenge comfortable assumptions in all areas; transport, food and the nature even of the sleep experience on offer in an hotel bedroom?

(18th May 2006 The owner of the Mövenpick Dream Castle Hotel at Disneyland® Resort Paris, UBX Development (France) SARL, a subsidiary of the Warimpex Finance Company domiciled in Austria, has dissolved the contract with the hotel’s leaseholder Park Hotel SNC, a joint venture between Thomas Cook AG and Dertour. The management contract signed in April 2003 between the two German tour operators and Mövenpick Hotels & Resorts is thus automatically terminated, and as of 1 June 2006 the theme hotel will no longer be part of the international hotel chain’s portfolio.

The Mövenpick Dream Castle Hotel at Disneyland® Resort Paris opened officially in July 2004 and was under the management of the Swiss hotel group for the last two years.

The family-friendly 4-star hotel offering 400 rooms will now be managed by Vienna International Hotels & Resorts, a company belonging to the owner of the hotel)