I had purposefully done very little research prior to first using Genie, Genie+ and Lightning Lane. I really wanted to get a feel for what the average person would deal with using these items.
Spending extra money on Genie+ and Individual Lightning Lanes can get expensive for a family. I think you can still have a great park day with out purchasing either or these items. But if you are limited on time I would probably recommend at least Genie+ and a combination of Individual Lightning Lane.
Disney Genie
Disney Genie is the free service meant to help you plan your day at the parks. Prior to going to the park on the MyDisneyExperince app home page there will be a “My Future Plans” section where you can select My Day. You will first have to select your date and party then begin to select the attractions, shows, dining you like. I really like that you can select if you have height requirements for children in your group or accessibility needs. We didn’t have those restrictions but I can see where it would be super helpful so you can plan accordingly.
As someone who likes to plan in advance, the down side to planning is it does not give you suggestions for your day until the day of. Prior to going, especially on busy days, I like to have a plan mapped out. At least in the general sense of – we’re going to get there at park open, head towards Tomorrowland first, break at 1130 for our dining reservations, etc. If you are ok with following suggestion and possibly zigging and zagging around the park then using this as a planning tool may be ok.
On the day of we did find that it had some strange suggestions for us, like going to the Tiki Room early in the morning and it kept suggesting dinning options that did not have reservations available. Why would they recommend dining that I can’t actually go to?
Overall I think I will stick with my preplanning, maybe after Genie learns more I will be more willing to give it a try. For most people they may only have 1 day at each park, I would hate for them to miss the items they really want to do because they are following Genie’s suggestions. Having a general plan of attractions you want to ride is always a good plan.
Disney Genie+
Genie+ has replaced the old free Fastpass system. It is a paid service (you pay per person per day) that will get you the ability to book a Lightning Lane return time similar to a Fastpass.
You will be able to book 1 Lightning Lane per ride per day from a select list of rides per park. Right off the bat here, my frustration is two-fold – you can only do each ride once per day, and only certain rides are included, others (the most popular ones) are an additional fee.
If you are staying at a Disney Hotel you will be able to book your first Lightning Lane at 7am, for everyone else you must wait to book your first at park opening.
We purchased Genie+ to test it out. We had trouble purchasing and received an error the first transaction, it went through our bank but we did not receive a confirmation number. So we did the transaction a second time and this time got a conformation number.
Once the time came to book our first Lighting Lane I went to the Tip Board this will allow you to see the current available Lighting Lanes. We were heading to Epcot so our plan was to rope drop Soaring around the world and we had gotten a very early boarding group for Remy so I was looking for a Lightning Lane for a few hours from park open. A few minutes in I was able to book a Test Track Lightning Lane. After this is when it got a bit confusing. We wanted to hop over to Hollywood Studios and I was having a hard time figuring out how to change parks in the app. I was trying to change the park in the My Day section of the Genie but after stopping to speak with a Guest Services associate they explained that you must got into the Tip Board section. Once in the Tip Board section you are able to see at the top of the page a change park link. It will open to select from all four parks. Once you select the park you are interest in you can then select a Lightning Lane time for your new park. I did find that if I closed the app it would reset my park back to my day park and I would have to change it back to my new park. We did find that several Lightning Lanes were unavailable after the 2 pm park hop time at some rides. Slinky Dog Dash and Smugglers Run were not available. When we decided to hop back to Epcot we were still able to select a Soarin Lightning Lane but noticed there were no Test Track times left. We still had several rides that we had not used our one Lightning Lane for at Epcot but to be honest we did not need to use them, the wait times were very low for most rides. Overall Genie+ had some faults, the app did a very poor job explaining how to use it while trying to park hope. I think if I had done more research before hand I would have known where to go and been able to potentially get a slightly better time for our first park that we hopped to. There is an interesting rule about 120 minutes that once you have a Lightning Lane booked if you have not used that one you can book a second 120 minutes later. I was not able to get this to work correctly and was never able to hold more than 1 reservation at a time. I am not sure with out doing research people would know about this because the app does not explain this rule very well. Like anything new there will be some type of learning curve but when you have money on the line paying for Genie+ the last thing you want is a learning curve. After all this is supposed to help you ride more rides with less wait time. It did save us a little bit of time I may try it again on a future trip, but I don’t think I will be adding it everyday of my visit. Paying $15 plus tax per family member for a day or two would probably be my recommendation for now.
Individual Lightning Lane is available for two of the top rides per park. You do not need to purchase Genie+ in order to purchase Individual Lightning Lanes. Each ride’s pricing is different and is subject to change by the day. We saw prices from $5 up to $15 per person per ride. Rise of the Resistance has consistently sold out very early in the day. Purchasing these is pretty easy, you select the ride and the time and move through the process to pay. Make sure you select a time that you know you can make because you wouldn’t want to miss your return window. We did discover that you can have a boarding group and an Individual Lightning Lane which is good news if you want to ride Remy or any other future ride that may have boarding groups. At least you would be able to ride that ride twice if you wish. If you have never been to the parks and only have limited time then I would maybe consider purchasing these. Overall I do not think that you have to purchase them to still be able to ride these rides. If you are ok rope dropping do one of these rides first in the morning. Or if you are staying until park close hope in line right before the park closes. I think there are ways to ride these rides with out having to pay for them. If there is a ride that is a must do for your family and Individual Lightning Lane is offered I would consider purchasing if you don’t want to rope drop or stay late.
