Disney's Animal Kingdom Lodge
Disney's Animal Kingdom Lodge is an African-themed deluxe resort hotel at Walt Disney World in Bay Lake, Florida, built around private savannas on which African animals graze within view of guest rooms and public areas. It opened on April 16, 2001, in the Animal Kingdom Resort Area, close to Disney's Animal Kingdom, the theme park whose animal programmes it shares.
History
The lodge was conceived in the mid-1990s alongside Disney's Animal Kingdom, which opened in 1998: if a park could be built around live animals, a hotel could be too. The design was entrusted to architect Peter H. Dominick Jr. of Denver's Urban Design Group, who had designed Disney's Wilderness Lodge in a national-park idiom and here worked in an African one. Dominick and Disney's designers spent several years researching safari lodges, vernacular building and folk art in Africa, particularly South Africa.
The building follows the form of a kraal, a traditional enclosed village, curved in a horseshoe around its savanna. Its lobby rises six storeys beneath a thatched roof, in fact thatch-styled roofing materials, and holds one of the largest collections of African art in the United States, including a 16-foot (4.9 m) Igbo Ijele mask from Nigeria, among the largest of its kind outside that country. The resort's construction cost was widely reported at the time as around $100 million.
Savannas
Three savannas of about 11 acres (4.5 ha) each — Sunset, Arusha and Uzima — wrap around the main building, known as Jambo House, and a fourth, Pembe, serves the later Kidani Village building. Together they are home to more than 200 mammals and birds of roughly thirty species, which live on the savannas full time and return to an on-site care facility for feeding and veterinary attention. Species kept have included reticulated giraffe, Grant's zebra, Hartmann's mountain zebra, greater kudu, impala, Thomson's gazelle, waterbuck, wildebeest, eland, bongo, okapi, red river hog and Ankole cattle, alongside birds such as ostrich, greater flamingo, marabou stork and East African crowned crane. Giraffes range across all the original savannas; other species are assigned to particular savannas suited to them.
The animal programme participates in the Species Survival Plan coordinated by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, and the savannas have recorded births of giraffe, zebra, okapi and other species. Viewing is not confined to bedrooms: the Arusha Rock overlook extends into the main savanna, and cultural representatives and animal specialists staff viewing areas during the day, with night-vision viewing offered after dark.
Dining
Jiko – The Cooking Place, in Jambo House, is the resort's signature restaurant, combining African flavours with Mediterranean and Indian influences around twin wood-burning ovens. Boma – Flavors of Africa is a buffet modelled on a marketplace, serving breakfast and dinner. The Mara provides quick-service meals. At Kidani Village, Sanaa serves Indian-influenced African dishes at tables beside windows looking onto the Sunset Savanna, so that animals graze a short distance from diners.
Kidani Village
Disney announced a Disney Vacation Club expansion in 2006. It took two forms: conversion of rooms on Jambo House's upper floors into villas, completed in 2007, and a separate building, Kidani Village, which opened on May 1, 2009, about half a mile from Jambo House and connected to it by walkway and shuttle. The expansion extended the Sunset Savanna and introduced further species. Kidani Village has its own lobby, restaurant and pool, Samawati Springs, but shares the savannas and animal programme of the resort as a whole.
Transport
Unlike the Magic Kingdom area resorts, the lodge has no boat or monorail service; buses are the sole Disney transport, serving Disney's Animal Kingdom in a few minutes and the other parks, water parks and Disney Springs on longer routes.