TOURISM : Hotel Del Coronado Imitates Disney at Replicating Game

When the owners of the century-old Hotel del Coronado go on vacation at a Walt Disney Co. resort, they must feel like they never left.

Disney, they say, has replicated the look of their famed Victorian-style hotel across the bay from San Diego in the design of the Grand Floridian Hotel at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., as well as in the new centerpiece Disneyland Hotel outside Paris.

And Disney wants to do it again. Plans for the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim call for the main 800-room hotel there to evoke “the splendor of the Hotel del Coronado . . . with a touch of urban sophistication.”

Now the Hotel del Coronado is fighting back. It recently put a 15-foot inflatable mouse on its front lawn. Though it bears an uncanny resemblance to Mickey, its shirt reads “Copy Mouse.”

“It’s all in good fun,” said hotel Chairman M. Larry Lawrence. “If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the folks at Disney should be at least half as flattered as we have been in seeing that company’s two replicas of the Hotel del Coronado.”