Every time I launched a new Disney resort, I'd spend months or sometimes years, finding the story that place was born to tell. Not trying to make it feel like something else by layering on more character or more of the magic that people expected from Disney. But finding the emotional truth only that specific place could claim, and building everything from there. 

I believed in that discipline and I still do. And when a resort finally launched, after laboring over every detail for so long, watching the first guests arrive felt like seeing a child off to college. A mix of pride and a little bit of sadness at the end of a chapter.

And then the social comments would start to roll in. Not about the campaign or the story we'd built around it. About the resort itself.

Not enough IP. Too plain. Where are the characters? Why does this feel like a Marriott with mouse ears?

It stung a little every time. As a creative, each launch was a labor of love. Not because the guests were wrong to want what they wanted. But because the tension they were naming was real and it still is.

Right now, every major entertainment brand seems to be building a hotel. The experience economy has been a talking point for years. Now it's a construction site. And the question at the center of it is finally being tested at full scale.

How much IP is enough? How much is too much?

Disney's answer across every resort I worked on was mood over character. Feeling over franchise. The Grand Floridian is Victorian Florida filtered through imagination, not a Mary Poppins hotel. Animal Kingdom Lodge is the African savanna felt from the inside, not a Lion King experience. Even when IP was present, it was accent rather than architecture. A statue in the lobby. Art on the walls. A reference in the carpet. The place itself carried the story. The IP supported it.

Sometimes we would push back internally. Guests wanted more. The data said so. Reviews said so. Give us something to sink our teeth into, we'd say. Give us IP, give us a world.

And yet Disney, who probably has more consumer research on this question than any company on earth, kept pulling back. And still does. I think that means something. Or someone is about to prove it doesn't.

That someone may be Merlin Entertainments. Opening at LEGOLAND Deutschland this year is the world's first hotel accommodation built entirely around the Harry Potter franchise. Not Harry Potter rooms tucked into an otherwise regular resort. A property carrying the IP as its core identity, from the lobby to the Hogwarts house-themed rooms to the bar. It's the most ambitious test of full IP immersion at hotel scale since Disney's Galactic Starcruiser, which tried the same thing with Star Wars and closed.

And Merlin isn't stopping there. Minecraft-themed lodges are coming to their US and UK parks. Bluey rooms at Alton Towers. PAW Patrol at Chessington. They are running every IP hotel experiment simultaneously. If anyone is going to answer this question, I think it's going to be them.

The Starcruiser failed for complicated reasons. The price point eliminated the most devoted fans. The multi-day commitment didn't fit how most families vacation. But underneath those execution problems was a more fundamental question it never quite answered. When you remove the four-minute ride and replace it with a seventy-two hour commitment, does the fantasy hold? Or does the guest eventually grow tired and just want a comfortable bed and a good night's sleep?

Universal answered that question their own way. Three new hotels at Epic Universe this year. All mood, all concept, no specific IP. They had Harry Potter, Nintendo and How To Train Your Dragon right next door and still chose mood over franchise. That's a choice.

A hotel is a twenty-year commitment. A franchise is a bet. Some pay off for generations. Others are gone before the paint dries. The IP that feels bulletproof today may look very different by the time the mortgage is paid off.

Maybe Disney's restraint was never about research. Maybe it has always just been about math.

The Harry Potter hotel and Minecraft lodges will tell us something. I'm watching with genuine curiosity, and a little of that launch day excitement. Wanting to deliver the IP to those fans who are craving it. I just hope they still want to wake up next to it in twenty years.