No More Advance Purchase of Genie+ After June 8th
And while the headline pretty much covers the latest news from Walt Disney World, there is a lot that can be read between the lines. And oh, we are going to read between the lines!
If you haven't already heard, Disney has announced they are making a change to how guests can purchase Genie+. Effective June 8th, Disney will stop allowing guests to purchase Genie+ pre-arrival and will only allow purchase the day of the visit, while availability lasts.
Guests who have already purchased Genie+ in advance while not be affected, even if their travel dates are after June 8th. Disney will simply stop NEW future purchases of Genie+.
Refresher Time!
Genie+ is a paid service via your MyDisneyExperience app that allows several features, but the most important of those is the ability to ride via the Lightning Lane. For $15 per guest per day ($20 per guest per day at Disneyland California) guests can book the next available Lightning Lane for one attraction at a time and then skip the standby line for that attraction. Upon scanning in, or upon two hours passing from the last Lightning Lane reservation being made, guests can reserve another.
According to Disney, guests can expect to use the Lightning Lane on 2-3 attractions per day, though we are aware of guests who have used far more than that, as well as guests who have not been able to make more than 1 reservation. A lot of this has to do with crowds at the time of the visit.
In addition to Lightning Lane, Genie+ also comes with some fun photo filters so you can make your own "magic shots" and audio tales from Disney Imagineering that provide behind the scenes information. But let's be honest, it's all about the Lightning Lane, which is basically the new version of Fastpass.
Important note: If all you care about is the single most popular attraction at each park, then chances are you might not even want Genie+, and you might want to spring for Individual Lightning Lane purchases for those rides. These rides are NOT available via Genie+'s standard Lightning Lane service and can only be reserved for an ad hoc fee. You do not need Genie+ to make an Individual Lightning Lane purchase, but again, the list of rides that use this is very small (one ride per park is the norm), and you can only use one per ride per day.
Speculation Time!
At first, our gut reaction to this announcement was alarm. Why would Disney stop you from purchasing something in advance? But the official line on this is, frankly, Disney has a demand problem. There is too much demand for Disney theme parks post-pandemic, and some guests have been disappointed by purchasing Genie+ only to find out that all the Lightning Lane availability for the day for any decent rides was gone. This is no surprise to us.
What is interesting is the wording that implies Genie+ may not always be available to purchase the day of in the future. It can be speculated that in order to avoid disappointment when few Lightning Lane slots are available, at some point, Disney will just turn off Genie+ purchases for the day and the guests who got in can have a decent experience while others will not be able to use it at all that day. Exactly how limited Genie+ availability becomes is yet to be seen.
The planner in me, the same one who plans to purchase Genie+ for my upcoming trip before June 8th now, sort of hopes Disney judiciously limits it enough that guests agree it is worth the planning and the $15. Strangely enough, the more guests in a standby line, and the fewer in a lightning lane line, the lower wait times for EVERYONE. This is because for every standby guest, Disney has been known to allow up to 10 Lightning Lane guests to jump ahead, making the wait even longer for standby guests. Then again, when everything is standby, ALL lines are ALWAYS long. Maybe there's a sweet spot in there and maybe with all their crowd engineering technology, Disney can figure out what that is.
In the meantime, our advice to you is if you already have tickets for dates after June 8th, get your Genie+ purchased if you definitely plan to use it. If you don't, then know that Genie+ can be purchased at Walt Disney World at 12 am the day of your visit (yes, midnight, when the date changes), and we recommend purchasing Genie+ on the day of visit definitely between 12 am and 7 am (which sounds awful while on vacation but will avoid you running into limited availability issues in most cases).
What do you think of this news? Are you a mathematician who can figure out the equation of equilibrium between standby and Lightning Lane guests that makes everyone happy? Because we'd love to hear from you! Comment here or over on our Facebook page where you can follow us to see when new articles are posted each week. Until next time...
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