Disney's Unbuilt Asian, Persian, and Venetian Resorts

Early Walt Disney World maps can look like evidence of a lost destination: familiar hotels share the landscape with an Asian Resort, a Persian Resort, and a Venetian Resort. But these three properties were proposals, not closed hotels. Disney’s Archives-assisted map history confirms their public announcement in 1969 and that none materialized.

They are best understood as part of a broader plan for a vacation destination. The hotel ideas were not simply extra room blocks. Their different visual identities would have made travel around the resort part of the entertainment, with lodging, recreation, and transportation belonging to the same designed landscape.

Five themes did not mean five opening-day hotels

A surviving Disney press release named Contemporary, Polynesian, Asian, Venetian, and Persian hotel themes. It described a development period extending through the first five years of operation, tied to public demand. The document also presented monorails, boats, and land vehicles as an integrated transportation network. See PDF page 12 of the original press material.

That wording is an important corrective to an attractive but misleading story: Disney did not describe all five hotels as simultaneously ready for opening day. A reader comparing the prospective map with a later photograph must separate the destination’s master plan from its first operating phase.

The Asian Resort: a plan that persisted

The Asian hotel was described in a 1969 preview as primarily Thai in decor. A later, firmer milestone appears in Disney’s 1972 annual report: the company expected to begin architectural work on a 500-room Asian Hotel and planned construction and opening in 1974.

That target was not met, but its existence demonstrates that this proposal still figured in published corporate planning after Walt Disney World began operating. Its later history should not automatically be assigned to the Persian and Venetian projects, for which the inspected sources do not establish the same 1974 timetable. The dedicated Asian Resort history follows those changes in more detail.

The Persian Resort: a palace-like composition

The proposal occupied a different body of water from the Asian and Venetian hotels. In Disney’s early resort illustration, its domed complex stands on Bay Lake’s western shoreline, north of the Contemporary. Jack Spence’s illustrated examination of the preview material also describes that north-of-Contemporary, east-of-Magic-Kingdom location. The placement is a proposed setting, not the footprint of a hotel that once operated. Disney’s original illustrated map, Spence’s map discussion.

Elizabeth Whitney’s 1969 newspaper preview, reproduced by ImagiNERDing, described the Persian proposal as a palace-like hotel arranged around a prominent blue dome, with balconies and a projected 500 rooms. This is a contemporary description available through a modern transcription, not evidence of an operating building.

The dome gave the proposal an immediately recognizable focal point. In the context of a destination built around water and movement, a distinctive outline could advertise a hotel’s identity from a distance. That is an interpretation of the described design, not proof of a particular completed facade, restaurant menu, or guest-room plan.

The Venetian Resort: waterways as the setting

The Venetian site lay along the eastern side of Seven Seas Lagoon, between the Transportation and Ticket Center and the Contemporary. Disney’s illustration shows the proposed waterfront complex on that stretch of the monorail circuit; Spence’s account explicitly identifies the two neighboring landmarks. Keeping it on the lagoon, and the Persian proposal on Bay Lake, prevents two distinct hotel sites from being merged into one vague “Magic Kingdom area” location. Early Disney map, Location and reproduced concept artwork.

The same reproduced preview described a 500-room Venetian hotel drawing on St. Mark’s Square and Venice-like waterways. Its identity therefore depended on a relationship between architecture and water, rather than merely applying Italian decoration to an ordinary hotel block.

This Venetian proposal belongs to the early group. It should not be collapsed into the later Mediterranean hotel studies: the University of New Mexico separately catalogs a Mediterranean project model associated with Antoine Predock and dated 1988–1991. The archival item record provides an independent marker of that later design history.

What replaced the plans?

Disney identifies the Grand Floridian as the hotel eventually built at the Asian Resort site. That is a connection between locations, not a renaming of an already completed Asian hotel. The 2013 map article’s observations about undeveloped sites should likewise be read as observations from 2013, not a current land-use survey.

Why all three hotels failed to open is less securely documented than their identities. The inspected announcement, annual report, and archival descriptions do not establish one common cancellation date or a single shared cause. Economic explanations, soil stories, and later changes of management need evidence tied to each specific project before becoming factual conclusions.

These resorts remain worth studying because they reveal the options considered for the original vacation landscape. Their historical value lies in the differences between those options and the resort that emerged, not in imagining that every drawing was a fully approved building awaiting construction.