The new displays will open for the park's Lego Star Wars Days on March 4-5, 2017. Other additions to the resort next year will include a "Surfer’s Bay" expansion (including a "competitive water raceway" with six slide lanes) at the Legoland Water Park, and Ninjago-themed rooms at the Legoland Hotel. And in 2019, the resort will open a second hotel, the Legoland Castle Hotel, the resort announced today.
New Jersey's Meadowlands is slated for a Nickelodeon Universe theme park, which developers say will be the largest indoor park in the western hemisphere, when completed. The project is planned to be part of the American Dream Meadowlands shopping and entertainment development, whose owner, Triple Five, is also behind Minneapolis' Mall of America, which also has a Nickelodeon Universe park. The development also is slated to include a Legoland Discovery Center, Sea Life Aquarium, a DreamWorks-themed water park, and an indoor ski slope. But don't book plans to visit until you read this paragraph from the NJ.com report:
Triple Five hopes to secure $2.7 billion in financing, including $1.15 billion in public bonds, by the end of September to resume construction on the long-delayed project. The site has been idle since April, when the developer ran into trouble funding the work.
In other words, it's not a done deal yet.
Finally, Wall Street analysts and Disney spokespersons are debating whether or not fears of the Zika virus are turning would-be visitors away from Central Florida and its theme parks, including the Walt Disney World Resort. A financial services firm cited two surveys last week that suggested that about half the respondents who had considered Orlando-area vacations had either decided against them or cancelled their plans, due to Zika concerns.
But a Disney spokesperson pushed back, saying that the virus has had "no real impact on cancellations or future bookings" at the Walt Disney World Resort.
It's hard to parse this one — I haven't seen the original survey so I can't make any judgment about its validity. (Anyone got a link to the demos/methodology?) And Disney didn't say anything about whether future bookings were up, stable, or down — just that the virus has had no real impact upon those bookings. But that would be hard for Disney to tell precisely, unless people explicitly cited Zika when canceling plans. And Disney wouldn't know about plans never made. Clearly, the company — and other parks in Florida — remain concerned about public perception of the virus, as illustrated by all that free bug spray they're distributing to guests.
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