Walt Disney World has added a new statement to its webpage about Disney Genie+ estimating how often guests will be able to take advantage of the upcharge service each day.
The new addition says, “On average, guests can enter 2 to 3 attractions or experiences per day using the Lightning Lane entrance if the first selection is made early in the day.” Currently, no limits have been placed on how many standard Lightning Lane reservations can be booked in a day, though individual Lightning Lanes purchases for select high-demand attractions are restricted to two per guest per day. Guests can purchase the service and begin making reservations beginning at 7 AM on the day of their visit, while additional time slots can be booked once the first one is used or expires, or two hours after park opening or when the first reservations are made, whichever comes first.
While this is strictly an approximation, the numbers do seem low. When Disney Genie+ debuted last October, we were able to book at least four attractions in a day with overlapping time slots. The language used suggests that this is to help manage guests’ expectations, rather than being the first step towards establishing a hard cap on how many Lightning Lane reservations can be booked in a day. As of the writing of this article, the estimate has not been added to the corresponding page for Disney Genie+ at the Disneyland Resort.
For comparison, the previous FastPass+ program (which was free to all guests) gave each guest three FastPasses per day with the opportunity to add more once the original three were used.
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That’s not entirely ture. Thanks to knowledge of thr old paper Fastpass system we were able to do 5 Lightning Lanes a day.
It also makes a difference in what the attractions are. When people purchase Genie+ they do so thinking of rides like Peter Pan, Big Thunder, Test Track, Soarin, Expedion Everest, Slinky Dog Dash, etc.
I’ve seen people, probably out of desperation, using the service on Little Mermaid, Seas with Nemo, Living with the Land, Star Tours, even Muppet Vision. When you’re doing those types of attractions, it’s obvious to me, that some people aren’t really enjoying the service as they hoped.
The problem is, whenever everyone has it, no one does. The wait times are insanely long and despite the 3 or 4 quick lines with Genie+, more time is spent in hour long lines for everything else.
It is true. If you do your first one at 7am, you usually get 3 a day. There are many that don’t really need a lightning lane. Sometimes, you are better off getting into line rather than waiting for your pass to come up. The question you have to ask yourself–is 3 passes worth $15/day?
Nope – not 4, not likely to be overlapping anymore. Just did G+ at HS and was able to get 3 worthwhile G+, starting right at 7am. And you have to be very timely and strategic to get 3 – like having an alarm set for every 2 hours after park opening. After getting 3, the only stragglers left were for things that had 15 min standby waits or less, making the G+ for these rather pointless. Also, if you have teens or others in your party that want to pass different rides for a short while, the pass times won’t line up enough, so you’ll likely have to choose between all the same passes for the day, or splitting up for the rest of the day – not ideal. You can’t select a G+ for a ride more than once a day, which stinks and the app doesn’t indicate which rides you’ve already used a pass for after you ride it, so selecting later passes can get confusing. At the 2 hour selection time, you have to close and reopen the app for it to show you as eligible for another pass – see my next comment. No matter what park you are in, your tip board will default to Epcot each time you open the app. And all of the gobbly-gook suggestions in the my day screen make it a pain to see your actual pass times. Oh, and it doesn’t take TS reservations into account when giving you pass time options. G+ is an awful necessity for most guests – plain and very un-simple.
We were just there the second week in March for four days. We got on eight rides, total for the four days. Granted, we weren’t pushing for as many rides as we could but the standby wait times were so long, and lightning lanes were completely full by mid morning. 140 mins for Space Mountain standby, or 330pm lightning lane. Also, I wasn’t going to mill around DHS all day for one ride at 8pm, using standby all day. We went back to the resort and sat by the pool on the third day because DHS was so full every attraction was over an hour for standby. I’m done wasting money.