Planned: 1967 through 1974, part of Walt Disney World’s original resort master plan. Location: the square peninsula at the end of Seven Seas Lagoon, now the site of Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort and Spa. Theme: Thai. Status: never built; construction was called off after the 1973 oil embargo, and the land was reassigned in 1988.
Walt Disney World’s earliest resort planning called for five hotels ringing Bay Lake and Seven Seas Lagoon, each built around a different theme. Only two made it out of the ground for opening day: the Contemporary and the Polynesian. A third, an Asian-themed hotel with a Thai identity, came close enough to have a road named after it before the money ran out. It’s one of three resorts from that original five, alongside a planned Persian and a planned Venetian, that Walt Disney World never built at all.
What Thailand had to do with a Florida hotel
The Asian Resort’s design leaned specifically into Thai architecture and hospitality rather than a generic pan-Asian theme, down to Thai furnishings in the rooms and Thai cuisine on the menus.
The layout centered on a tower more than 160 feet tall at the middle of a large square footprint, its outer walls sloping inward around a central atrium in the same A-frame vocabulary Welton Becket had just used next door at the Contemporary. That central building was slated to hold a themed restaurant and lounge at the top, mirroring the Contemporary’s own “Top of the World” setup. Guest rooms surrounded the tower on three sides of the square, leaving the fourth side, opposite Seven Seas Lagoon, open: 600 of them in the plan, split roughly two-thirds lake or garden view with the remainder in the tower itself, plus 50 suites finished in Thai royal decor. Below the guest floors, Disney intended to build a full convention center, tucked under the main resort levels rather than in a separate building.
How close it actually got
This wasn’t a sketch that stayed on a drawing board for a decade. Disney’s 1972 annual report referenced the project directly, stating that architectural design work would begin shortly; by that point later planning had already trimmed the room count from 600 down to 500. Physical models of the hotel existed, along with land survey work, and construction had a target start date of 1974 with an opening meant to follow soon after. This was a resort that, on paper, was maybe two years from a groundbreaking.
What actually stopped it
The 1973 oil embargo hit at almost exactly the wrong moment for a hotel scheduled to break ground the following year. Travel demand cratered along with a broader recession, and Disney shelved new resort construction across the board rather than opening a hotel it wasn’t confident it could fill. The Asian Resort wasn’t singled out. The Persian and Venetian resorts planned for the same expansion died the same year, for the same reason, and none of the three ever got revived once the economy recovered.
The land didn’t stay entirely idle in the meantime, at least on paper. A service road was cut through the property and named Asian Way, a rare case of a canceled resort leaving a physical trace on Walt Disney World’s map for over a decade after the project itself was dead.
The site’s second act
By the early 1980s, hotel occupancy at Walt Disney World had recovered enough that Disney went looking at its unused land along Seven Seas Lagoon again, and the old Asian Resort site came back under consideration for new construction. Groundbreaking on what would replace it happened in April 1986. What eventually rose there wasn’t a revival of the Thai concept. Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort and Spa opened on the site in 1988, a Victorian-styled flagship built from scratch rather than any leftover Asian Resort planning, and its arrival closed the book on the original project for good.
Little-known fact: Asian Way itself didn’t disappear when the project died. It kept its name for years afterward and wasn’t renamed Floridian Way until 1986, two years before the Grand Floridian opened and roughly thirteen years after the resort it was named for was canceled. For most of that stretch, the road sign was the only thing on Walt Disney World property still describing a hotel that no longer had any chance of being built.
The site now carries one of the resort’s most recognizable buildings instead, and the Contemporary next door is the clearest surviving example of what the Asian Resort’s own A-frame tower was designed to echo. The monorail system that would have served it runs everywhere else Disney actually built, three resort stops today (Contemporary, Grand Floridian, Polynesian) against the five monorail resorts the 1969 master plan called for. It’s a reminder that Walt Disney World’s map today isn’t a completed version of a 1960s blueprint. It’s what got built after the blueprint changed.