Planned: 1967 through 1974, as part of Walt Disney World’s original resort master plan. Location: shoreline sites around Bay Lake and Seven Seas Lagoon, on or near the monorail loop. Status: never built; all three were shelved after 1973 and never revived in their original form.
Walt Disney World opened on October 1, 1971, with two resort hotels standing on the shore of Bay Lake: the Contemporary and the Polynesian Village. Two was never the plan. Disney’s earliest resort concepts for the property called for a ring of themed hotels around Bay Lake and Seven Seas Lagoon, five in total, each built around a different identity the way the Contemporary leaned into modern steel-and-glass futurism and the Polynesian leaned into the South Pacific. Three of those five never got past the planning stage: a Persian resort, a Venetian resort, and an Asian resort with a specifically Thai identity. All three were victims of the same mid-1970s crunch, and pieces of what they were meant to be resurfaced years later in hotels Disney actually built.
The five-resort plan
By 1969, Disney’s planning had settled on five resort concepts for the property, working names that later Disney historians have reconstructed from period marketing packets and cast newspapers: U.S.A. Disney, Disney South Pacific, Far East Disney, Venice Disney, and Disney Persian Palace. The first two became the Contemporary and the Polynesian Village. The Contemporary and Polynesian went first because their designs were furthest along and their themes, futurism and Polynesian resort culture, tested as the safest bets for opening-day tourists unfamiliar with Central Florida. The other three theme concepts were still in active design work when the money ran out.
Each of the unbuilt resorts was slated for a different piece of shoreline. The Asian resort was planned for the peninsula at the end of Seven Seas Lagoon, the site later occupied by Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort and Spa. The Persian concept was sited on the west shore of Bay Lake, north of the Contemporary, away from Seven Seas Lagoon entirely. The Venetian concept was aimed at the shoreline between the Contemporary and the Ticket and Transportation Center, near the water bridge, intended to round out the loop so that a guest could ride the monorail past a rotating set of architectural identities rather than the same A-frame profile repeated four times.
The Persian resort
The Persian concept called for a circular building arranged around a central structure topped by a 24-foot dome, rendered in white and blue. Early drawings paired it with a proposed monorail spur that would have run through Tomorrowland to reach it, a branch line the rest of the resort loop never got. It was conceived in the same wave of planning that produced the Contemporary and Polynesian, meant to give Walt Disney World’s resort loop an exoticism distinct from either of its opening-day hotels.
The Persian resort’s design work never advanced as far as the Asian resort’s did. Where the Asian project reached physical models, land surveys, and a graded service road before cancellation, the Persian concept is documented only through postcard-style renderings and early drawings, no models or site work on record. What is consistent across the record is the timing: like its counterparts, the Persian resort died with the rest of the resort expansion in 1973 and 1974, when the same economic conditions that killed the Asian project ended Disney’s broader resort expansion.
The Venetian resort
The Venetian concept drew on the canals and campaniles of Venice: gondola transportation on canal-style waterways in place of open lagoon frontage, and a 120-foot campanile as a signature landmark. As a resort concept it would have leaned on water more heavily than either the Contemporary or Polynesian.
Like the Persian resort, the Venetian project never advanced publicly beyond concept-stage description in the early 1970s, and it was shelved in the same mid-1970s wave of cancellations. Disney did revisit the idea once, decades later: in 1999, Imagineering worked with Wimberly, Allison, Tong & Goo, the same architecture firm behind the Grand Floridian, on a luxury Venice-themed resort called Grande Venezia, envisioned as a rival to the Grand Floridian itself, complete with working gondola canals, a masquerade-themed pool, and a wedding chapel. That project reached blueprint stage before it, too, was shelved. Epcot’s Italy pavilion, which opened in 1982 as part of World Showcase, is the closest thing Disney actually built, though it delivers Venetian architecture as a walkthrough attraction rather than as guest rooms.
The Asian resort, briefly
Of the three cancelled hotels, the Asian resort is the best documented. Planned for the peninsula that later became the Grand Floridian, it reached the stage of physical models, land survey work, and a named service road, Asian Way, before the 1973 oil embargo ended it. That project’s fuller history, including how close it came to a 1974 groundbreaking and what eventually replaced its site, is covered in a dedicated look at Disney’s Asian Resort.
What actually killed all three
The 1973 oil embargo is the single event most consistently cited as the reason Walt Disney World’s resort expansion stalled in the mid-1970s. Fuel shortages and price spikes hit American road-trip tourism hard, and a broader recession followed close behind. For a company weighing new hotel construction against uncertain travel demand, breaking ground on three more themed resorts stopped looking like a safe bet. Disney shelved new construction across the resort loop rather than gamble on filling rooms it wasn’t confident it could sell, and none of the three, Persian, Venetian, or Asian, was singled out. They died together, for the same reason, in the same narrow window.
None of the three were quietly revived once the economy recovered later in the decade. By the time Disney went looking at its unused Seven Seas Lagoon shoreline again in the early 1980s, the company built something new rather than resuming any of the shelved designs. The Venetian idea got one further look, under a different name, at the end of the 1990s, but even that didn’t survive to groundbreaking.
Where the ideas resurfaced
The clearest afterlife of this canceled trio is architectural rather than literal. Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort and Spa opened in 1988 on the old Asian resort site, and while it borrowed nothing of the Thai design directly, it picked up the same ambition the cancelled resort represented: a flagship hotel meant to anchor Seven Seas Lagoon with a level of theming and grandeur beyond what the Contemporary or Polynesian offered. The Grand Floridian’s Victorian seaside-resort theme was a wholly new direction, but its role in the resort lineup, the one hotel meant to feel like an occasion rather than a convenience, is close to what the Persian and Venetian concepts had also been reaching for: a themed destination distinct enough to be worth the monorail ride out to it.
Epcot picked up the more literal thread on a smaller scale. World Showcase, which opened in 1982, gave Disney a way to build immersive national and regional architecture, Italy’s Venice-inflected piazza among them, without the financial risk of an entire resort hotel behind it. A pavilion only has to justify its own footprint, not a few hundred guest rooms. The full-scale version of the idea got one more chance in 1999, when Imagineering and the Grand Floridian’s architects drew up Grande Venezia, a Venice-themed luxury resort with working canals, before that project stalled at the blueprint stage too.
What stands there now
The Magic Kingdom’s monorail resort loop today runs three stops deep, Contemporary, Polynesian, and the Grand Floridian, plus the Ticket and Transportation Center, a system that still reads as one stop short of whatever the original five-resort plan intended. The Persian and Venetian sites never got built on in any themed form; the shoreline earmarked for them became part of the property’s general undeveloped land, absorbed into later expansion that had nothing to do with the original concepts. Little-known fact: of the three cancelled resorts, only the Asian project left a physical trace on Walt Disney World’s map, a road named Asian Way that kept that name until 1986. The Persian and Venetian resorts left no comparable marker at all, nothing but a line item in planning documents from a company that, for a few years in the early 1970s, thought it was building five hotels instead of two.