Genie+ Sells Out in Record Time as Peak Season Christmas Crowds Arrive at Disney World
Genie+ has sold out in record time at Walt Disney World for the week leading up to Christmas, with peak season attendance arriving early at Magic Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, EPCOT, and Animal Kingdom. This post covers wait times, the likelihood of the line-skipping service selling out additional days between now and New Year’s Eve, and other commentary on crowds and paid FastPass.
For starters, let’s talk crowds. It’s not going to surprise anyone that this is going to be a busy week. Crowds always build in mid-December, and it’s typically the case that the weeks leading up to Christmas and New Year’s Eve are two of the busiest of the year. More of a surprise to a lot of people is that the first full week of January is often just as busy, which is due to the confluence of winter break for Central Florida schools, lifting of Annual Pass blockouts, and WDW Marathon.
The most variable of those when it comes to crowds is actually this week, with attendance driven by the day of the week of Christmas. This year, it’s on a Monday. As a result, we expected this week see the Christmas and New Year’s crowds consolidated into next week. Last year, Christmas was on a Sunday; crowds started increasing from seasonal lows on December 17, hit peak season numbers on December 19, and stayed there until January 6.
Following last year’s trends (adjusted for Christmas 2023), we previously predicted that peak season crowds would start on December 18. That was accurate–crowd levels hit 9/10 on Monday. However, we also expected crowd levels to level off or even drop slightly on subsequent days this week, rather continuing to increase. Our money was on December 22, 2023 being the arrival of true peak season crowds, and the start of a 2-week stretch of the worst dates since this January–which would mean it’s busier than Easter.
The jury is still out on that prediction. Yesterday (December 19, 2023) was also a 9/10 crowd level and was technically 1 minute worse (53 minutes vs. 52 minutes) than Monday. So technically, the ‘level off or even drop slightly’ part was incorrect. But I still wouldn’t bet against today or Thursday being slower.
Honestly, it’s difficult to know what to expect for the next few days. Annual Pass blockouts are starting to hit harder and weekend pricing is higher, so it’s entirely possible that Saturday and Sunday will continue the trend of weekends being less busy than weekdays. That’s relative, though; December 22-24 will be some degree of bad no matter what.
My expectation is that school breaks and people starting Christmas vacations at the end of this week are enough to more than offset all counterweights. Hence the prediction of peak season crowds arriving December 22, 2023. It might feel like the parks are already there–after all, is there really that much of a difference between 9/10 and 10/10 crowd levels?
Well, it depends. Technically, there can be as little as 1 minute in average wait times that separates 9/10 and 10/10 crowds. That’s necessarily the case with all crowd levels–it’s how numbers work. But that’s only on the low end. On the high end, the sky is pretty much the limit on 10/10 crowds.
That may not make complete sense, but last year’s peak week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve is a good illustration. December 20 was a 10/10 crowd level day with an average wait time of 54 minutes–that was only one minute higher than yesterday’s 9/10 crowds. By contrast, December 29 was the worst day of last year, also with a 10/10 crowd level but an average wait time of 67 minutes.
That’s a 13 minute spread–which is absolutely massive–but the exact same crowd level. Nowhere else on the scale (except, I guess, 1/10 since it could theoretically start at 0 minutes–but that never happens in practice) has that range. Usually a crowd level has a range of a few minutes before it moves up or down. Not 10/10. It can be 54 minutes, 67 minutes, 80 minutes, etc. That’s why we sometimes refer to dates like those between Christmas and NYE as 10+ days.
Hope that makes sense. Even if not, the salient point is that there are varying degrees of ‘bad’ crowds and that 10/10 isn’t a static level of awfulness. Right now is pretty bad, but next week will almost certainly be way worse. On the plus side, the parks will be operating in ‘maximum efficiency’ mode, which presents more opportunities for beating the crowds if you’re willing to work a bit.
We’d highly recommend reading Making the Most of Midnight in Magic Kingdom & Beating Peak Season Crowds! That’s a recent post that I put a ton of work into based on my midnight experience, and it was relatively overlooked by readers (I probably should’ve done the hours updates separate from the strategy. Live and learn.) In any case, the tips there can save you a ton of time and stress if you’re visiting Walt Disney World in the next few weeks.
Against that backdrop, here are the prices for Genie+ at Walt Disney World on December 20, 2023:
- Multiple Parks (valid with Park Hopper tickets): $29
- Magic Kingdom: $29
- Disney’s Hollywood Studios: $26
- EPCOT: $21
- Animal Kingdom: $18
Curiously, these price points are well below peak season rates, which max out at $35. (Before the hate mail comes in, I’m not saying these prices are “cheap” or anything like that. They just are not commensurate with current crowd levels.)
It’s not particularly surprising that Magic Kingdom and Multiple Parks sold out faster than ever, in less than one hour after park opening.
What is surprising is that Magic Kingdom is only open from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. today. This is absolutely baffling for a few reasons. First, because it’s the week before Christmas–having those hours never made sense divorced of any context.
Second, once you add context it makes even less sense–today is the only day in a 4-day stretch when Magic Kingdom is not closing early for Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party. Magic Kingdom closes at 6 pm on party days, which causes crowds to consolidate into the days when the event is not being held. Having 3 out of 4 days be MVMCP is a bad idea always, but doubly so during a busy week like this. A really guest-unfriendly scheduling decision, if you ask me.
What’s much more guest unfriendly is 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. hours on the lone day that the park is open late! Even if the original internal attendance projections didn’t call for heavy crowds today (there’s no way they didn’t–and if they did, it’s time for new models), it would’ve become patently obvious over the last 2 days that crowd levels would be heavier than anticipated and a last minute extension was warranted. (It’s not too late for a same-day extension to the closing time, Walt Disney World!)
That would explain why Genie+ sold out so quickly today for Magic Kingdom. Heavy crowds due to MVMCP on Dec. 19 and 21-22 coupled with shorter hours. It’s a recipe for disaster.
This is not to say Genie+ won’t sell out the next two days or that crowds will be light in Magic Kingdom. During Thanksgiving week, Genie+ also sold out on party shortened days at Magic Kingdom. Even though crowds should be lower on Dec. 21-22 in Magic Kingdom, they’ll still be bad–it becomes difficult to plan around MVMCP when it happens so often. Not only that, but fewer operating hours means less Lightning Lane capacity to sell in the first place.
Bottom line, expect Genie+ selling out to become the rule rather than the exception for the next couple of weeks. We’d also expect an overnight jump to peak season ($35) prices starting tomorrow. Once next week arrives, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Magic Kingdom and Park Hopping hit $40, Disney’s Hollywood Studios costing ~$37, EPCOT at ~$35, and Animal Kingdom at ~$30. If that doesn’t happen and $35 stays the max, it’ll be a small victory.
Ultimately, there’s no easy fix to this issue for Walt Disney World. In the near term, capping Genie+ sales is the best solution. In the medium term, our expectation is that Walt Disney World’s crackdown on DAS abuse will accelerate in 2024, and that alone should free up a lot of Lightning Lane inventory. (Seriously. Judging by the comments to that post, many of you massively underestimate just how much abuse–not just proper use–of DAS is occurring.)
The move to advance-booking of Lightning Lanes will also change things, but that will not increase Lightning Lane availability, because it cannot. It’ll be a reallocation. (It can, however, have the appearance of an improvement if paired with a DAS crackdown…) Longer term, the solutions are restoring all entertainment that is still (STILL!) missing, repurposing underutilized areas of each park, reimagining rides that are unpopular. Oh, and of course, park expansion and building more new rides.
It’ll be really interesting to see how many days Genie+ sells out between now and January 6, 2024. Almost all dates between now and then will be busier than Thanksgiving or Easter, when Genie+ was priced at $35. If it does continue to sell out this week, will Genie+ hit $40 between Christmas and New Year’s Eve?
My sincere hope is that guests have finally reached their breaking point. With the pullback we’ve seen in all other forms of spending, that may finally be the case. In that scenario, $35 might stand as the record-high price for the line-skipping service at Walt Disney World–and prices might finally start to recede. (Just as they have for Walt Disney World’s resort hotels, which are actually down year-over-year due to dramatically better discounting this holiday season!)
If you have questions about the basics of using–or not using–the paid FastPass service, see our Guide to Genie+ at Walt Disney World & Lightning Lane FAQ for all of the foundational need-to-know info. This whole system is confusing and convoluted, so you might have a question or two-dozen. That answers all of the most common ones we’ve been receiving from readers.
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YOUR THOUGHTS
What do you think of current pre-Christmas crowds and Genie+ selling out in record time? If you’re visiting during the weeks of Christmas or New Year’s, what’s the maximum price you’ll pay for the line-skipping service? Any other considerations we failed to take into account or details we missed/got wrong? 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!
Our family of five (three elementary age kids) were at MK on Monday 12/19/2023 from (early) early entry to shortly after fireworks finished. While it was busy, I dunno if my “radar” for estimating crowds is broken, since it didn’t really feel hugely busier than a trip in the first week of June this year (third week of January was definitely quieter, as was a pre-Halloween party day in September). We’ve never purchased Genie+ and just use a strategy of walking by attractions with a wait time that’s unreasonable for how the kids are feeling/acting at that time – although if they insist on waiting 70 minutes for Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, we do it. (It’s an interactive queue after all, and we play games like Heads Up in queues!) Tom’s commented before on the difference between “feels-like” crowds and posted wait time data, and I thought 12/19/2023 wasn’t a 9/10 “feels-like” day at all – if others disagree, then wow, we have a significant degree of patience for crowds! 🙂
I’ll write something positive about my last visit to WDW (the #1 week following Thanksgiving).
I arrived at the Dinosaur Standby line in AK, only to be dismayed to see a large bright yellow T-Shirted youth group in front of me. I generally balk at staying in line with this type of large youth group, due to line jumping, general rudeness, youth lying on the ground playing with their phones, etc.
To my utter surprise, a lagging portion of this group of youths (5-ish) with their adult chaperones came up behind us as I was contemplating leaving the line. This small group of youths tried to do the usual line jumping/cutting, and something unexpected happened — the adults immediately called them back and strictly said “That was not proper behavior, and under no circumstances were they to jump up to their friends”.
Just wow! I stayed in line because I was intrigued to see how the group dynamic played out. This group was better mannered than many families I encountered. I was so impressed with the adult chaperones who actually chaperoned, that I asked and encouraged them to join their group.
There are plenty of instances of good behavior at WDW — we (me included) tend to focus on the bad behaviors and become jaded in the process (except for the DAS abusers who hold a special place in my thinking). Darn! Now I have to start over.
Tom, too much talk about the 10/10 days. When are you going to go for it and call the Spinal Tap 11/10 day.
I hope your readers get the reference to the movie.
Best Wishes to your family for a lovely Christmas Season and a Happy and Healthy 2024
We were in MK yesterday with my parents on 12/22. Did Tron with a VQ. It was a 30 minute wait. Bought genie for $35 each and rode everything we wanted with very minimal waits. Definitely needed to buy Xmas cruise first. Crowds were very manageable and thank you Tom for alerting us to doing MK on party days. Hopped out of there at 5 as everyone was entering. One of our favorite days at MK but will probably pay for it tonight with the crowds at Minnie’s Xmas fireworks! Merry Christmas everyone!
We went to Disney the second week of October and it was very busy. Used the lightning lane feature several times. Honestly it’s gotten ridiculously expensive and we are going to Europe next year instead. Why pay high fees when you can travel abroad. I don’t see going back to Disney unless we have grandchildren in the future.
As a passholder I am very happy to be blocked out at this time. I enjoyed October 1 for the 50th but that was enough. Don’t care to do that ever again. We also love going the week after Thanksgiving. And we always do Magic Kingdom on the day of a party. Hope to see you in the park someday. Merry Christmas to you, Sarah and Megatron.
I’ll be there for Christmas week….. Will likely buy Genie+ most, if not all days. That said, looking at the price over the week is startling. 7 days…. Genie+ and a Individual Lightning Lane, per person…. For a family of 4, roughly between $1200 and $1800, depending on prices. While I’ll typically pay for those types of add-ons for the convenience, even I’m debating whether I’ll really need it every day. (We will be doing Extended Evening Hours at Animal Kingdom… maybe don’t need it that day…. And if we are planning very late arrivals at Magic Kingdom, maybe don’t need it for the 9pm to midnight hours… ).
On the one hand, I have to think that many families will be resistant at those prices. At the same time, there are plenty of people who can afford it — And plenty of people who will see the 2 hour lines, and decide they have to swallow the prices in order to save their once-in-a-lifetime trip even if they can’t afford it.
You definitely don’t need Genie+ at Animal Kingdom if you stay under normal conditions. It was worth it to me to get a paid LL for Avatar Flight of Passage, but everything else was perfectly doable without Genie+ on my last visit. Of course, this wasn’t during Christmas week! That could be the one time you’d benefit from Genie+ at AK.
My only concern for AK is Safari…
We plan on doing a mid to late afternoon arrival… dinner at Yak & Yeti at 5… Enjoy extended evening hours.
We love the safari and wouldn’t want to skip it. Obviously, not available during extended evening hours. So really have to do it before dinner — I don’t want to show up at 3pm and wait in a 90 minute line for Safari.
I was at Epcot, Animal Kingdom, and the Christmas Party this week. Using Genie Plus and ILL to make sure we got Guardians made for tolerable waiting. The biggest disappointment was long lines at both Seven Dwarves and Space Mountain even at 11:30 pm. Peter Pan was also crazy, but we have no interest in that one.
Due to what I hope and pray is a short term medical condition, at the recommended of my doctor, I registered for DAS for the first time this week. While I’m very grateful for it, the process of registering opened my eyes as to how easy it must be to abuse. I do not take a position on how widespread the abuse is (and it’s very easy to misjudge invisible but real disabilities as the stroll through the lightening lanes), but I do think Disney needs a different approach than trusting people won’t lie (and teach their children to lie) over a video chat to skip lines and avoid buying Genie+. I suspect that it is not only making lines longer for standby guests but also partly how LL get SO surprisingly long at times.
I also wonder if they’ve started selling fewer Genie+ passes when they know they have a lot of advanced registered DAS guests in the parks to combat that problem (which could be what’s motivating the crackdown)?
I’m glad that DAS is there for people who need it, but the wording is so vague I really don’t know who would qualify. Case in point: my 84 year old step-father has Alzheimers and is in a wheelchair most of the time at the parks since he tires easily. The thing is, he’s perfectly fine waiting in line with us in a wheelchair.
I took some criticism for “being uninformed about DAS”, but Disney’s own instructions say that people who use a wheelchair don’t need DAS. Another person told me that simply having an old person in your group who gets tired after 12 hours at Disney qualifies your entire party for DAS.
I think it would greatly help if they could identify the specific diseases or conditions that DAS was intended to ease, otherwise people are left guessing.
We just returned from WDW and stayed from 12/9 to 12/17. We never got out of our room until 9:00 but managed to ride all rides without Genie+ and never waited more than 20 mins. Single rider lines and a free LL pass we used for TSM got us all we needed. The LL pass was for the breakdown of Mickey’s Runaway Railroad. No biggie for us. We were helped by one rainy day and cooler temps. We ate at Space220 which was fun.
@Suzie. We did 12/10-12/16 and it was awesome. No Genie+ needed, reasonable or nonexistent wait times until Friday afternoon/evening when attendance seemed to explode. We slept in as well (except for two mornings where we got VQ for Guardians), and still had zero issues doing everything multiple times.
We’ll be back same week next year!
With close relatives in Orlando I’ve endured so many Christmas’s and Thanksgivings at WDW since even excessive crowds are better than sitting around with my relatives discussing how many cents gas prices went up last week. 🙂
Genie+ can only do so much when the parks are at 9/10 or 10/10. Looking at other social media posts on Genie+ at Christmas, people are complaining that they paid $29 and all of the Genie+ reservations were gone by 3PM and the ones they could get weren’t at a convenient time.
Sorry, but this is not the right time to come to WDW and get on every single ride you want at any time you want. This is the season for wall-to-wall, shoulder-to-shoulder crowds shuffling to get into position to see a parade or fireworks. If you get on some rides, great, but otherwise we just enjoy the decorations and the shows.
This is a great time to enjoy a nice ride on the Liberty Belle (especially at night) or rekindle your appreciation of the Country Bears :-).
I do not like Genie +, but that said, I have used it and have bought ILLs, mainly because we were introducing 1st time visitors to WDW and wanted wanted their experience to be the best it could be. Here are my ideas: The ratio of LL guest to Stand by guest should never be more than 50/50. This will keep stand by lanes moving. The sale of Genie + would still be limited. Genie + would give 4 any ride, anytime, any park LL access to rides that day. If, for instance, a lighting lane has a 20 minute wait for Peter Pan vs, a 70 minute stand by wait, the guest can decide if using one of their 4 Lightning Lanes for that ride at that moment makes sense to them. Once the 4 are used, they are done. If they don’t use them up, they lose them.
I agree, KenR. Snagging one of the limited number of Genie+ for an attraction should give you access to a shorter line, not a guarantee of a walk on. Zipper merge the two lines. Everybody keeps moving, everybody’s happy. With DAS guests, plaid tours, Golden Oak members and VIPs, all in the lightning lane, these lopsided ratios that Disney is using means the standby lines barely move.
I just don’t get it! Genie+ for all parks was $27 when we went recently on a (predicted) 6/10 day. Why bother w variable pricing if the range is so narrow?
I think it’s a combination of factors:
1) Not wanting to push prices too high, too quickly. Remember, Iger made a big deal about Chapek having raised prices too quickly. (Fans are still complaining, but ticket prices for WDW did not go up this year–that’s a pretty big deal!)
2) They don’t know what they’re doing. So many fans assume that Disney has all of this data and is great at forecasting crowds, but they really aren’t. Earlier this year, it took them forever to adapt Genie+ prices to weekends being slower. Now, prices are still well below peak at hours are surprisingly limited (and the latter isn’t a matter of Disney being cheap–there have been no shortage of 8 am to 11 pm or midnight closings the last two months).
“today is the only day in a 4-day stretch when Magic Kingdom is not closing early for Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party.”
This, in my opinion, is unacceptable. You are charging people peak prices to be there this week, and you know it’s going to be crowded. MK *should* be operating on extended hours (including the party as part of a regular day?) and not selling the park twice.
100% agreed. Not mentioned in the article, but there’s also Disney Jollywood Nights tonight at DHS.
They did the same thing during Thanksgiving week–it’s how they’ve managed to increase the number of MVMCP dates.
Normally, I am not averse to Magic Kingdom closing early during Party Season. I think it’s easy enough to plan around, and presents strategic advantages for those who do their homework. However, not during the weeks before Thanksgiving and Christmas, and not 3/4 days. It becomes impossible to work around, and leads to terrible crowding on non-party days. I cannot fathom trying to watch Happily Ever After tonight–you couldn’t pay me enough to be on MSUSA right before or after that.
Sticking with the 9 am to 10 pm hours is just icing on the cake. It’s like someone is asleep at the wheel.
No one is asleep at the wheel. The intentional crowding is done on purpose. The worse the crowding is, the higher the Genie+ pricing rises. Money is made two ways – with higher Genie prices and lower staffing by not having extended hours.
Then why weren’t prices higher today? And why have they increased hours for a ton of dates in November and December, but not today?
You’re welcome to conclude that this was done on purpose; I’d be inclined to agree had Disney not made two miscalculations, one of which is to their own detriment.
Huge Disney fan, and Wilderness Lodge at Christmas has been on my bucket list for a while. With the PIN I received a couple of days ago, I’m finally considering actually doing it next year in mid-December 2024. I see you stated in this article that the day of the week Christmas falls on impacts crowds. With it falling midweek on a Wednesday next year, how does that impact the peak?
I have followed you since planning our first trip with my son, and I just love reading your articles even when we have no trip plans. I loved reading of Megatron’s first Disney trip and how magical it was for you as parents. That is where the true magic and love for Disney started for me as well- when we first took my son and experienced the magic through his eyes.
The first two weeks of December 2024 will still be ideal. As you might know, we love arriving the weekend after Thanksgiving and staying through the following weekend.
I would imagine that this week (Dec. 15-21, 2024) will still be bad, but maybe in the 8/10 range rather than 9/10 to 10/10. I’d go a week or two earlier if at all possible.
Look to school calendars to get a feel for crowds for 2024. This year, many kids finished on the 15th, which pulled in holiday guests earlier than normal. Next year most schools are getting out later (20th) but they don’t return until January 7. This year the sweet spot was the week after Thanksgiving, I was there and the crowds are ridiculously low. But I think that’s because Thanksgiving was super early. If you look at next year, Thanksgiving is actually very late so it’s going to crunch all of that into an even shorter time frame. We are desperately trying to find some time to go down to Wilderness for Xmas next year but with late t-giving and a senior having to take finals Dec 16-19, I’m just not sure what we can realistically do. So many families are in the same boat, that’s why early-mid December is so great. The reason I have a hard time bringing myself to book the actual holidays is for the short hours, the crowds, and you pay so much more for the rooms, tickets and flights. In actuality, your trip basically cost twice as much as a trip in September or early June, but you only get to do half as many things because of how busy it is. Magic Kingdom should be open from 7 AM to midnight every day this week. Epcot and Hollywood too. It’s basically a travesty.