Are Disney World’s Genie+ changes already heading for a change… again?
The last news cycle brought us word that The Walt Disney Company is making changes to their Genie+ service for Walt Disney World Resort. The premium app allows guests to select a number of attractions to skip the lines for, in what once was called FastPass, now relabeled “Lightning Lanes.” On one hand, the changes were a positive: having guests unable to reserve Genie+ far in advance protects those who don’t have reservations until more recently. On the other hand, the solution of having people register their Genie+ purchase at midnight, then race to grab the attraction Lightning Lane line skips seven hours later, is a recipe for exhaustion. As you would imagine, the reception to this was not fully positive.
Read About All the Changes with WDW Magic
Genie+ has a ‘fool me once’ problem. Many guests buy it, feel scammed, and don’t buy again. So Disney will have to tweak it and make it more exclusive until repeat guests want it again. I think they’re taking a very cumbersome route to an eventual Express Pass-style service.
— Brayden (@SirBrayden) May 19, 2022
i love how they keep doing all this silly shit with genie plus it’s almost likes it’s a dumb idea and doesn’t really work 🤔
— bug 🤍📰🖋️🖤 (@cowboylikebug) May 18, 2022
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but we were at Magic Kingdom on Friday during spring break and we got on 19 attractions without Genie+ or Lightning Lane purchases.
Plus we saw two cavalcades. And the fireworks.
And, you know, ate food.
— Krys(Sn) (@KrystinStiefel) May 19, 2022
It is 2023.
Genie Plus must be booked in person once you arrive to the park.It is 2024
Genie Plus must be booked in person via a kiosk at each attractionGenie Plus is just original Fastpass
— JoshFromOrlando🏳️🌈 (@JoshFromOrlando) May 18, 2022
Based on the “mixed” reaction, we’ve held up on a strategy article that we’ve developed which will try to help guests navigate Genie+ as best as possible. Understand simultaneously, we don’t necessarily recommend guests purchase Genie+ anyways. We’ve studied the issue on multiple occasions and not found that there’s a tremendous benefit to the Genie+ service. That’s different than our conclusions about individual lightning lane purchases.
Are Wait Times Accurate at Walt Disney World?
What we discovered was that other than Rock’n Roller Coaster (which went down briefly while our staff waited), the queue wait times posted by Disney were substantially longer than the actual time guests wound up waiting. When combined with the merge points for Lightning Lane, we found that Lightning Lane picks via Genie+ provided almost no benefit except for a very few attractions at peak crowd levels. We also found that often, Lightning Lane purchasers were seen entering empty queues for attractions that had almost no chance of ever featuring long waits. These families likely hadn’t been to Walt Disney World often and were wasting their Lightning Lane options on rides that had no merit for even including a Lightning Lane.
For now, we’re holding on our article about the new strategy because a source for That Park Place writer, WDW Pro, is conveying that there may be a quick change to the policy forthcoming. We’re hoping to hear more about that today. If not, we’ll release our strategy and update it once the policy is changed. However, it’s hard to imagine Disney World sticking with a system that is likely to lead their most excited and plan-focused guests to get less than seven hours of sleep because they’re glued to their phones and smashing the Disney servers with attempts to fight for Lightning Lane reservations. That just doesn’t seem like a great concept.
If changes happen today, we’ll let you know. If not, we’ll have strategies coming up for how to navigate this… shall we say… “silliness.”
For all the latest news that should be fun, keep reading That Park Place. As always, drop a comment down below! We really do read them.
