Disney World Moves Individual Lightning Lane Rides to Genie+ for Christmas

As an indirect result of Genie Collapsing in Crowds During Thanksgiving, Walt Disney World has tweaked Genie+ and Individual Lightning Lane selections for the weeks leading up to Christmas and New Year’s Eve. This post will take a look at the changes, reasons why, and offer speculation for the future.

By way of recap in case you don’t want to read that lengthy ‘crowd collapse’ post, there were many problems with Lightning Lanes and the paid FastPass service during what was the busiest week of the year (so far) at Walt Disney World. Those ranged from increased technical difficulties to limited ride reservation inventory with the whole system and technical infrastructure placed under greater stress.

From our perspective, the biggest “addressable” issue was that Genie+ Lightning Lane availability for many popular attractions was gone not long after park opening. Slinky Dog Dash was unavailable well before that, booking up for the entire day within minutes of 7 am. There were virtually no worthwhile options by midday, meaning that even savvy users of Genie+ are likely only getting a couple of “good” selections per day. Novices or those visiting parks other than Magic Kingdom would likely be doing worse. Some readers reported only scoring 1-2 Lightning Lane selections via Genie+ for the entire day.

In an effort to remedy this, Walt Disney World has announced that one Individual Lightning Lane attraction per park will be reallocated to Genie+ during peak holiday travel dates.

Specifically, between December 19, 2021 and January 3, 2022, Expedition Everest – Legend of the Forbidden Mountain at Animal Kingdom, Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway at Hollywood Studios, Frozen Ever After at Epcot, and Space Mountain at Magic Kingdom will be included in the flat-rate Disney Genie+ service and will not be sold a la carte as Individual Lightning Lane purchase options.

Let’s start with some practical advice for anyone visiting Walt Disney World during the busy Christmas and New Year’s Eve weeks. Below are our Genie+ ride rankings for each park, along with quick addendums for where each of the aforementioned attractions slot into those priorities:

Magic Kingdom Genie+ Priorities & Lightning Lane Ride Ranks – Space Mountain becomes the #3 attraction, with Splash Mountain dropped to #5 or #6 if you’re visiting on December 21 or later (unrelated to this–due to colder weather).

Hollywood Studios Genie+ Priorities & Lightning Lane Ride Ranks – Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway moves to #2, still a very distant second after Slinky Dog Dash.

Epcot Genie+ Priorities & Lightning Lane Ride Ranks – Frozen Ever After takes the title of #1, which is (objectively) more like a tie for #1 with Test Track. (My guess is that it won’t be a tie–Frozen Ever After will likely be considerably more popular and go faster.)

Animal Kingdom Genie+ Priorities & Lightning Lane Ride Ranks – Expedition Everest enters the equation at #3, a good distance behind both T1 attractions.

In terms of methodology, this is based on average daily wait times for July. That’s the last busy month before the launch of Genie+ and Lightning Lanes. Wait times in August/September were below average and since October have been skewed by that system, which reordered some priorities. The best data would come from a “normal” November/December, but we haven’t had one of those in 2 years (last year was atypical due to reduced efficiency attractions) and a lot has changed since then.

We’ll start the commentary with the why and continue with thoughts on the future. Some of you, let’s call you the optimists of the group, might see this as a sign that Individual Lightning Lanes are “failing” and that’s forcing Walt Disney World to drop an attraction from each park.

While that’s possible, we’re highly skeptical of that being the motivation for this. It’s true that Expedition Everest and Space Mountain weren’t selling particularly well for many dates, with near-immediate return times much of the time and lower standby waits, as well.

However, Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway and Frozen Ever After were doing fairly strong numbers, even on non-peak days. As both were likely to average triple-digit standby waits in the next two weeks, they probably could’ve sold out of Individual Lightning Lanes during that window.

Space Mountain and Expedition Everest likewise would’ve seen a bump in sales during peak holiday dates. It’s also difficult to say what good/bad sales look like for those under normal crowd levels, as ILL is pure profit. Even with near-immediate returns, those Individual Lightning Lanes might’ve been meeting expectations for Disney.

More likely, this change is being made to prevent Genie+ from being overwhelmed during periods of high demand, which is what occurred in the lead-up to Thanksgiving. That resulted in some of the longest lines in each park being at Guest Relations, countless refunds issued for Genie+ and, if comments on this blog are any indicate, poor guest satisfaction.

In last week’s “Sweet Spot” for Genie+ at Walt Disney World, our expectation was that the company would do something about those issues, probably before Christmas. That even listed a few possible solutions, one of which was moving Individual Lightning Lane attractions down to Genie+. It’s still possible some of those other approaches will be implemented if this is insufficient for balancing demand with capacity.

As mentioned there, one solution is adding attraction capacity to the Genie+ service so it more can absorb and satisfy more demand on the system. There are two ways of doing this at Walt Disney World, with the first being to build more attractions. Given that it’s taking them ~6 years to clone a launched motorbike roller coaster in a warehouse from Shanghai Disneyland, this doesn’t seem like a realistic suggestion.

The other would be to remove Individual Lightning Lanes and roll those into the Genie+ service. This also may seem like an unrealistic suggestion, because money. However, for attractions like Expedition Everest–that are performing poorly as ILLs–the case could be made that including them with Genie+ would increase purchases of that system, and ultimately be a net positive for Disney’s bottom line.

Without knowing what the utilization rate of Genie+ is at Epcot, a similar argument could be made there with Frozen Ever After–even though its ILL is performing reasonably well. We’ve been advising against buying Genie+ at Epcot since it’s not worth the money due to the limited worthwhile attraction count, but suddenly, that equation has changed considerably.

Given that Epcot and Animal Kingdom were borderline for Genie+ purchases in the past, this change could result in enough sales of Genie+ to more than offset the losses of Individual Lightning Lane revenue. The next two weeks aren’t the best test of that, as Genie+ demand would’ve been sky high regardless.

It’ll thus be interesting to see whether Walt Disney World quietly extends this into early January 2022–or indefinitely–to see how the numbers shake out under more normal conditions. (Also noteworthy that Expedition Everest has extended downtime coming up, and Epcot is opening another headliner in mid-2022. These changes could become permanent with those on the horizon.)

The other interesting change here is Space Mountain at Magic Kingdom. Even though it wasn’t selling all that well, the big difference is that Magic Kingdom wasn’t having problems with demand for Genie+ or available supply/capacity of attractions for that. Moving Space Mountain to Genie+ probably doesn’t entice many new purchases, either.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens going forward there. Part of me thinks maybe Space Mountain was bumped down for the sake of continuity–1 ILL in each park for the next couple weeks. The alternative is that Walt Disney World is anticipating demand for Genie+ that reaches unprecedented heights during that time frame, which could mean worse crowds than Thanksgiving.

Ultimately, this does change the equation for purchasing Genie+ when visiting Walt Disney World in the next couple weeks. Previously, we said that crowd levels in the 6/10 to 8/10 range were the sweet spot for buying Genie+, with it being unnecessary when numbers are lower and frustrating/less useful during peak season. This does nothing to alter the “frustrating” part of that–unless Disney IT has magically ironed out a decade worth of problems in the last few weeks, tech problems will likely persist.

What it does change is the “less useful” side of the ledger. Assuming you don’t mind some My Disney Experience glitches and email codes, Genie+ is an absolute no brainer for Magic Kingdom the next two weeks. The same is true for DHS, so long as you go in with a strong strategy and awareness that availability for headliners goes fast. Epcot and Animal Kingdom are more open questions, with my gut saying it’s probably going to be hard to score both Test Track and Frozen Ever After in the same day. As always, the best-value approach there will be Park Hopping between the two.

With these new changes, we’ll be in the parks at Walt Disney World this week to do more testing (give it a few days–currently in Michigan). Our original plan was to focus on Magic Kingdom due to daily ops of Mickey’s Once Upon A Christmastime Parade, but this probably makes Epcot worth testing, as well as revisiting Disney’s Hollywood Studios. We’ll continue to keep you posted with on-the-ground updates and developments about Genie+ at Walt Disney World.

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YOUR THOUGHTS

What are your thoughts on Walt Disney World moving an Individual Lightning Lane attraction from each park to Genie+? Think it’s a sign of ILL failure, or simply balancing of demand and capacity? Think it’ll turn into a permanent change anywhere? Do you agree or disagree with my assessment? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!