A History in Postcards
In previous chapters I've shown a few cards that were of the "free with stay" variety, these cards were given to guest who stayed in Disney owned hotels either at check in or they might just be found in the room in a drawer or on a desk. Those facts help frame one of my favorite little WDW postcard jokes, I've often said to folks to whom I've talked to these cards about that they are either the least expensive, or most expensive, postcards WDW has produced, it just depends on how you look at it. That said I have found that, even if you are not staying at a Disney resort, if you ask nicely at the hotels where they have these types of cards they will often accommodate you, you can't count on it (the cast member may point out to you that if they give too many to non guests they won't have them for their own guests, that has happened to me, but only once or twice in the dozens of times I have asked, much more frequent is the resort simply not having any at the moment), but as has often been said "it never hurts to ask". The cards I have previously shown of this variety were (in all but one case) of the "standard" size of 3½ x 5½ inches, that one exception was a postcard of the Polynesian resort hotel was a 4x6 "continental" size; the other thing that ALL of those previous cards shared were stock numbers beginning with 7530- or 7550- Now these aren't the only cards that feature views of the hotels many cards with images of the hotels on them have also been sold over the years too, in fact because they have had both cards for sale and, these separate images they have given away, there have been quite a few different images of most of the original hotels over the years. On this page I'll re-cap those previously covered "free with stay" type cards, and on the next pages we'll cover the ones released in the 1990's and onward.
Contemporary Resort Hotel
Polynesian Village Resort Hotel
The two cards for the Polynesian Village Resort shown here are similar in an unusual way, although they both have different images they have the same stock number. In another way they, not obvious from the scans here, they are quite different, for many years in other parts of the world (other than the USA) the typical postcard size has been 4 x 6 this size was referred to by postcard collectors as Continental size, some time during the late 1970's Continental size started to become more common in this country, for some reason the Polynesian Village Resort was the first of WDW resort hotels to catch on to this trend, and the card below was probably the first WDW resort hotel postcard to get published in this size.
Village Resorts
The Village resorts were located across the lake from what is now known as Downtown Disney, they occupied much of the same space where Saratoga Springs DVC resort is located now. There were several different styles of units and they were built in groups over the years and each had their own card. Additionally there may be another card as the three cards shown here are numbered 7530-62149, 7530-62150, and 7530-62152, which obviously leaves a gap in the sequence of numbers at 7530-62151 so that MIGHT be another card, or perhaps that number was used for another kind of merchandise entirely. If there is a forth card it is probably for the "Club Lake Villas or Vacation Villas" it's also possible that the elusive other card was for the Grand Vista Homes, but that seems a bit unlikely as those were much as the name implies a group of single family homes, and there were very FEW of them (in the one photo of them I recall seeing I believe they sat on a cul-de-sac). I'm not sure if the Village resorts had their own restaurant or not, since they were located so close to the Lake Buena Vista Club (located in the club house of the LBV golf course) that may have served well as a fine dining location for the resort. There was a bit more on this resort in an earlier chapter.
Fairway Villas
Treehouse Villas
Club Lake Villas or Vacation Villas
I'm not sure precisely which group of Villas are represented by this card, I suspect due to their proximity to the lake they are the Club Lake Villas (later called Club suites) rather than the Vacation Villas (which were in later years called Townhouses). The Club Lake Suites were some of the last units to open and the opening, in September of 1980, of these 136 units coincided with the opening of the Lake Buena Vista Conference Center. (Disney News Fall 81 page 5).
The Golf ResortIn 1973 151 new rooms opened at Walt Disney World in the form of The Golf Resort this new resort was situated near the club house of the Palm and Magnolia golf courses, those courses are just across the road from the Polynesian Village resort. The combination of the first hotel not on the monorail line, and the "Golf" theme made this resort less popular than the other two hotels, after Michael Eisner came on board with the company in the 1980's the name and theme of this resort was changed to The Disney Inn with Disney and Disney Characters as the theme (specifically Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs). Unlike the Contemporary and Polynesian resort hotels, both of which were featured on MANY cards for sale (in addition to their "free with stay cards) The Golf Resort was only featured on one, an aerial view, I also only know of one example of a "free with stay" for this resort when it was "The Golf Resort", and it has a 1983 copyright on it. So was there another "free with stay" type postcard for this resort? It's possible that this resort had other free with stay cards and that I just haven't ran across them yet, it's also possible that perhaps that card that was sold of the resort was also used as a give-away card, and of course there is the possibility that they simply didn't have a give away card at all. 
Above: The "free with stay" card for The Golf Resort.
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Last modified by Brian K Martsolf at 26-Jan-2008 07:36 AM