Port Orleans / Dixie Landings Resort History
Disney’s Port Orleans Resort first opened to the public at the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida on 17th May 1991, with the original ground-breaking during the fall of 1989. Originally featuring just 432 guest rooms in three buildings, the room count was soon increased to 1,008 as construction on the remaining four buildings was completed.
Disney’s Dixie Landings Resort first opened to the public on 2nd February 1992 featuring the rustic styled Alligator Bayou Lodge buildings. Shortly after that, phase two of the resort opened with the more elegant sophistication of the Magnolia Bend mansion buildings bringing the total number of guest rooms up to 2,048.
Dixie Landings was linked to the Port Orleans Resort, and then onward all the way to the Disney Village Marketplace area, by the Sassagoula River, a man-made waterway named after the Native American word for the Mississippi.
At Port Orleans, Bonfamille’s Cafe, the full-service restaurant adjacent to the main lobby, closed its doors for the last time at the end of service on 5th August 2000. Boatwright’s Dining Hall, the remaining full-service restaurant at Dixie Landings, continued to serve both sections of the resort.
On 1st March 2001, the transformation of Dixie Landings and Port Orleans into one large resort began with changes to road signage around the two resorts.
On 1st April 2001, Port Orleans and Dixie Landings officially merged to form one large resort. In fact, the two sections had always shared the same management team but this process completely removed all vestiges of the old Dixie Landings terminology. The reason for the merger has never been made completely clear, but many think it was largely due to the inferred racial and slavery undertones of the Dixie Landings cotton plantation backstory.
The combined resort is now to be called Disney’s Port Orleans Resort, with the area formerly known just as Port Orleans changing its name to Disney’s Port Orleans French Quarter and the area formerly known as Dixie Landings changing its name to Disney’s Port Orleans Riverside. The combined resort now spans some 325 acres and features a total of 3,056 guest rooms, making it the largest in Walt Disney World.
After the terrible events in New York in September 2001, the subsequent drop in tourist demand meant that Disney needed to reduce some of its resort capacity. From late November 2001, French Quarter was completely closed and Riverside’s capacity was severely curtailed to around 350 rooms. Guests who had bookings were contacted and offered alternative resort choices. The Sassagoula River Cruise was also taken out of service for several months. As demand picked up again, French Quarter was reopened for new bookings starting from 31 May 2002. Disney apparently used the six month downtime to undertake renovation work on the food court.
A year later, French Quarter was once again closed for more extensive update and renovation work to all guest rooms from 4 May 2003 until 21 March 2004, see the Local News 6 website for details. The freshly renovated rooms had new furniture, new carpeting, new wall coverings and remodeled bathrooms. 200 new or rehired staff were recruited to reopen the resort. Subsequent year-long renovation work at the larger Port Orleans Riverside resort was undertaken on a building-by-building basis, starting with the Magnolia Bend mansions, and did not require the closure of the whole resort.
On 1 June 2007, all Walt Disney World resort hotels became completely non-smoking, with just a few designated outdoor smoking areas defined for those who still feel the need to light-up. Smoking is no longer allowed in guest rooms, on balconies, in corridors or in any other public areas. Previously, smoking was permitted at Riverside in Lodges 17, 27, 28, 34 and 36, Acadian House and Oak Manor, and at French Quarter in buildings 2, 4 and the upper floors of 6.
Sassagoula Times
The Sassagoula Times is the free handout information sheet which has been issued to guests staying at the Port Orleans / Dixie Landings Resorts since they first opened. It started as two extremely elaborate eight-page tabloid newspapers (the Sassagoula Times for Dixie Landings and the Sassagoula Sentinel for Port Orleans) which documented the entire fictional backstory to the two resorts, but more recently has been reduced to a single, simpler four-page letter-format resort information handout.
For more details of the elaborate faux history of the resort, please visit the Backstory page, or for scanned/downloadable copies of the newsletters from 1996 to the present day, please see the Documents page.
Other Reading
Here are a few other related websites I’ve found which may be of historical interest:
- Matt’s Dixie Landings page (Link now appears to be broken)
- Walt Dated World’s Dixie Landings page
- Sassagoula Times content from a 1996 issue (from “Iago’s Disney Pages”) (Hometown sites now appear to be defunct, well done AOL!)
- Big Brian’s Walt Disney World History in Postcards, POR/POFQ pages
