Disney Cruise Line announcements at D23

We were on hand to see the Disney Cruise Line presentation on Friday morning.  Of course the big announcement was that when the Disney Wonder moves permanently to the west coast in 2011, that DCL WILL be making cruises to Alaska despite previous rumor to the contrary. 

                      

They just won’t be making any of them to Glacier Bay.  Instead the Wonder will leave from the port of Vancouver, BC and sail the waters of the southern Alaskan including Juneau, Ketchikan and Skagway.  The full press release in case you missed it is here.

The interesting thing about the press release is that is has MORE data than was actually given in the presentation!  The Wonder is going into drydock in October for an undisclosed period, but the press release DOES mention that they will be adding a new dining option on Deck 10 called Outlook Café, which will connect to the Cove Café immediately below, which is the coffee/cigar/whiskey bar in the adults only area.  No pictures were given, but I take this to mean that they’ll be adding a new glassed in area on the upper deck (Deck 10) that will either take the place of the teen hang out in ‘the stack’ or wrap around the stack in some fashion to provide the vista views promised.

Only two real disappointments in this presentation I thought.

The first was that we waited in line almost an hour for what was support to be a 60 minute discussion.  We thought we’d get a few announcements and maybe some discussion about the cruise line, the new ships, how the cruise line business works, etc. etc.  What we got instead was a 30 minute very nicely put together marketing blitz that while intimate in size (only 198 people were let in the room that the day before had held over twice that many for the Imagineering discussion), wasn’t so intimate in presentation. 

The second was that almost NOTHING was said about what was going to be going on with the new Disney Dream.  It’s suppose to report on duty in 2011 so that the Wonder can leave for the west coast and presumably so that the Magic can leave again for Europe.  The only announcement really was what the statue would be (that of Admiral Donald).

Not much else to share with you on that front, though they did have a model in the Imagineering area.  Here are a couple of shots showing the front and back of the new ship (they didn’t stitch together very well of the overall length). 

So we’ll have to wait until later to hear more…

All pictures in this post are copyright The Walt Disney Company.