My Great Day Using Lightning Lane Multi Pass at Disney’s Hollywood Studios!
Hollywood Studios is the park with the most headliners and highest average wait times at Walt Disney World, making line-skipping especially valuable. With the launch of the new Lightning Lane Multi Pass system, I made pre-arrival ride reservations and headed to DHS to test the paid FastPass service on a moderately-crowded day.
This was actually one of a few field tests I’ve now done of Lightning Lane Multi-Pass (LLMP) at Walt Disney World. “Unfortunately,” crowds were even lower than expected on a couple of those days, rendering them useless from the perspective of a post like this. I know, I know…low wait times is a good problem to have! But not when trying to test strategy and produce representative results for LLMP that’ll be remotely useful for anyone visiting from October through December.
I shouldn’t be surprised, but it turns out that Walt Disney World’s pre-arrival pricing is not perfectly predictive of crowds. This isn’t the first time their forecasts have missed the mark. For those wondering what I mean by this, basically what I’ve done so far is target the most expensive days and do testing on those. In any case, I did have success at Disney’s Hollywood Studios and managed to hit the park on the busiest day of this month (so far).
Honestly, even that isn’t saying much. The day of my visit had an average wait time of 34 minutes and a crowd level of 4/10. I don’t want to oversell it–this is not even remotely busy by Disney’s Hollywood Studios standards. My personal threshold for moderate crowds at DHS is around 40 minutes, and 50 minutes for high crowds. However, the scale has shifted as crowds have slowed down across the board.
With that said, don’t make the mistake of assuming Lightning Lane Multi Pass was not necessary on this day because everything was a walk-on or had low actual wait times. To the contrary, there were rides with wait times exceeding an hour and some fleeting instances of triple-digit waits.
On this 4/10 crowd level day at DHS, here’s a rundown of average wait times (all wait times data is courtesy of thrill-data):
- Slinky Dog Dash: 78 minutes
- Star Wars Rise of the Resistance: 60 minutes
- Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster: 59 minutes
- Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway: 49 minutes
- Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run: 46 minutes
- Tower of Terror: 43 minutes
- Toy Story Mania: 42 minutes
At various points, every single one of these rides had wait times that were over an hour long. However, all of them also had much more manageable wait times over the course of the day, too. It all depends upon when you hit each attraction.
Nevertheless, it seems like Walt Disney World fans have unrealistic expectations for what “low crowds” means at DHS in the current era. This wasn’t exactly a dead day–it just wasn’t nearly as bad as DHS can get during the heart of the holiday season.
In any case, this photo report walks you through my step-by-step day using Lightning Lane Multi-Pass, with advance & same day selections, what I accomplished using LLMP during low to moderate crowd levels (by 2024 standards), and thoughts at the end about whether Lightning Lane Multi-Pass is worth the money at DHS.
Before we get going, it’s important to note that this is simply my day at Disney’s Hollywood Studios using Lightning Lane Multi-Pass. It’s not a recommended itinerary, touring plan, or universally-applicable day that I would suggest replicating. Simply what I did over the course of testing LLMP during a day at DHS. For actual advice, see the following:
- Disney’s Hollywood Studios Lightning Lane Multi Pass Ride Ranks
- 1-Day Disney’s Hollywood Studios Itinerary (No Lightning Lanes)
- Early Entry & Rope Drop at Disney’s Hollywood Studios
- Afternoon & Evening at DHS
If you’re trying to accomplish just as much in a day without Lightning Lanes, savvy strategy is required at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. It’s the toughest park to tour at Walt Disney World. There’s no magical formula for sleeping in, rolling up to the park a couple hours after rope drop, not buying Lightning Lane Multi-Pass, enjoying the park in a leisurely way, and accomplishing everything.
Anyway, let’s move along to my day using Lightning Lane Multi Pass at Disney’s Hollywood Studios…
I had an on-site split stay, which enabled me to purchase Lightning Lane Multi Pass seven days prior to the start of my entire trip. With split stays, there’s always the possibility of problems, but these were linked in My Disney Experience and I had no issues whatsoever. Nevertheless, I still waited until the 7-day mark as other pieces of my planning fell into place.
As a result, I didn’t have every return time option available to me. Ideally, I would’ve wanted to knock out Slinky Dog Dash first and had slight overlap on all of my return times. Slinky Dog Dash first is both for the sake of convenience (I like doing Early Entry in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge and Toy Story Land) and efficiency (Slinky Dog Dash gets a long line even early on).
Lightning Lane Multi Pass is a bit of a balancing act. In order to “run the table” on headliner Lightning Lanes at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, it’s usually imperative to stack your bookings in the 9 am, 10 am, and 11 am hour. This is due to the ‘rolling 3 rule,’ which allows you to always have 3 Lightning Lanes booked–and in order to book more, you first need to redeem something. You’re thus incentivized to aim for earlier return times so you can book subsequent selections.
The problem with this approach is that first thing in the morning is often when standby lines are the shortest–so you want to return early, but not too early when you could be knocking out rides with short lines via standby. This is why a lot of fans loved Genie+ and its stacking rules.
Fast-forward to the day of my visit to Disney’s Hollywood Studios. After tapping into my first Lightning Lane (Tower of Terror), I immediately booked my next Lightning Lane. The best option at this point was Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run.
You’ll note in the screenshot above that my return time for Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run is 10:45 am to 11:45 am. I’m not this lucky. My initial return time was early afternoon, but I played the refresh game until I was satisfied with a better return time.
This would also work well with my itinerary if I were trying to minimize backtracking. Disney’s Hollywood Studios has a really small footprint as compared the other parks, so I don’t mind some backtracking, but it’s nevertheless nice to knock out two nearby attractions in quick succession.
Before anyone bemoans having your face in a screen with LLMP, my rough “rule” for playing the refresh game is limiting it to my time in the Lightning Lane return line after tapping in. This means I have anywhere from 2 minutes to 10 minutes–it all depends on whether there are two tap points, where merge occurs, etc. Tower of Terror allows for more time since there’s queue after the pre-show. In any case, it took maybe 90 seconds of refreshing before I scored that Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run return.
After tapping into Toy Story Mania and Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run, I booked Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster and Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway.
These return times actually would’ve worked well with my schedule. In theory, I could’ve done stage shows or non-headliners at DHS to kill time during the middle of the day. In actuality, I was still doing Food & Wine Festival taste-testing, so I could Park Hop over to EPCOT to do that for lunch before returning for afternoon and evening at Disney’s Hollywood Studios.
One thing worth noting is that Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run didn’t have a long line at all. The posted wait time was 30 minutes, but I’m guessing the actual was closer to 10-15 minutes. On slower days, I’ve noticed that ride reservation refills at Walt Disney World track with posted wait times.
Meaning that if wait times drop or spike, Lightning Lane inventory adjusts accordingly, also going up or down, and pushing return times later or moving them forward. At least, this is my theory–corroborated by dozens of days of use (and many more of observation). This is nothing new–it’s how Fastpass+ and Genie+ also worked.
That’s really one of the big differences between slower and busier day at DHS. While both are going to have hour-plus wait times for the headliners, the crowded day is going to have even worse wait times. No surprise there.
More important from the Lightning Lane perspective is that most attractions won’t run out of ride reservations until very late on a slow day. There’s a ‘tipping point’ of sorts on less-busy days where purchasers of LLMP falls below the overall allocated capacity for Lightning Lanes, and makes it really easy for most attractions so long as you book early and often via the rolling 3 rule. This was one of those days.
Tangentially related, this is part of the genius (for Disney) in moving from Genie+ to the pre-arrival Lightning Lane Multi Pass. Under the old same-day system, guests visiting during slower seasons (like right now!) might use Genie+ one day, realize it was unnecessary after seeing/experiencing some standby lines, and not buy it during subsequent days of their trip.
Under Lightning Lane Multi-Pass, many guests will purchase for every single day of their vacation in advance, before even experiencing the ‘feels like’ crowds or wait times. They’ll buy as a hedge or due to fear, uncertainty and doubt…even though they wouldn’t have purchased Genie+ in the same circumstances. (Just something to consider if you’re visiting on borderline dates and are on the fence about Lightning Lane Multi Pass!)
After doing Slinky Dog Dash, I was effectively done with Lightning Lane Multi Pass at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. I had already gotten every ride reservation I wanted, and re-rides aren’t possible. But I’m a completionist, so I booked Alien Swirling Saucers for some/no reason. I had no intentions of riding it, just got it to prove I could, I guess.
That’s probably the same reason I modified my Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Return time, moving it forward 15 whole minutes, from 3:30 pm to 3:15 pm. Total gamechanger. This does illustrate an important point: Lightning Lane Multi Pass tries to avoid overlapping plans (see the warning) and the auto results it gives you when pre-booking will typically not have any overlap.
However, you can override this (to the extent possible) by modifying in advance. The wisdom of doing this is debatable. Again, you want to be able to do some rides via standby first thing in the morning, so returning ASAP isn’t always the best strategy. It’s a balance.
There’s zero downside to overlapping in the afternoon when standby lines are at their longest. By default, the system will still try to prevent this from happening. I usually modify and have significant overlap unless there’s a different reason not to (rides on opposite sides of the park, hunger, sunset photography, etc).
As a reminder, it’s possible to enter the Lightning Lane up to 5 minutes early or 15 minutes late. There is no need to ask for a Cast Member’s permission to do this–it doesn’t require a computer override. If anything, asking a CM might result in confusion, as it’s possible they might not know about this Lightning Lane “rule.” (No knock at them–there’s way too much to keep track of with Genie!)
Again, my original plan was to head to EPCOT for lunch and return to DHS. However, I saw earlier availability for Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster pop up, so I modified my time and grabbed that. I’m making a point of watching MuppetVision 3D as often as possible (for obvious reasons), so I did that while waiting for my return time.
While waiting for MuppetVision, I opted to push back my Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway return time so I didn’t have to get back to DHS from EPCOT quite as early. (Again, I had no intentions of riding Alien Swirling Saucers. That’s just a trophy Lightning Lane.) Even if I planned on booking Lightning Lane Multi Passes at EPCOT (and I did!), there was little downside to doing this since I’d have open slots from both RnRc and ASS. There’s no way I was scoring three worthwhile LLMPs at EPCOT, so not having that empty spot didn’t hurt me at all.
This is as good of time as any to share my refresh strategy, which is going to the modify screen and then toggling the “close” dropdown to refresh times. Compare the left and right, the latter of which shows pop-up availability for 4:25 pm that wasn’t there 2 minutes earlier. In my experience, toggling this “close” dropdown is the most efficient way to play the refresh game. YMMV.
Fast-forward to afternoon and evening, and wait times all around Disney’s Hollywood Studios were significantly lower than when I left for EPCOT. My Lightning Lane for Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway was useful, but barely. I’m betting it saved me 10 minutes, tops.
All waits were minimal by 6 pm or so. Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, which I had also done during Early Entry, had a posted wait time of 25 minutes and was actually a walk-on. On slower evenings when downtime isn’t bad, a posted wait time under an hour often means near walk-on status. (At the end of the night, it was only 10 minutes–that’s a rare posted wait time to see for RotR!)
It was a similar story with Slinky Dog Dash. This had a posted wait time, but one look at the queues led me to believe the wait time was about half of that. The standby line here later in the evening benefits from LLMP users leaving, doing dinner, or opting for Fantasmic instead of their Lightning Lane reservations.
Ultimately, I ended up using Lightning Lane Multi Pass to secure all four top tier Lightning Lane selections and the only two worthwhile second tier attractions during this 4/10 crowd day at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. (I also booked three at EPCOT: Soarin, Living with the Land, and Spaceship Earth.) I probably could’ve scored 10+ Lightning Lanes had I also done the pointless ones for stage shows.
Going by posted wait times during my return windows, I saved over 3 hours waiting in line at Disney’s Hollywood Studios (plus another hour or so at EPCOT). This was actually down considerably from my last time testing Genie+ on a similar day at DHS, and that’s almost entirely because I pre-booked several ride reservations earlier in the day when I otherwise would’ve preferred to be doing attractions via standby. By contrast, I often found myself stacking by default at DHS and using the 120 minute rule under the old system.
Three hours saved is going to be enough to make Lightning Lane Multi Pass worth the money to the average tourist. Of course, that amount of time savings assumes posted wait times are accurate (they are not) and that I would’ve waited in standby lines at identical times as my LLMP returns (I would not).
I could’ve gotten a lot done via standby during Early Entry and at rope drop, and also been aggressive with standby lines at the end of the evening. With that said, using Lightning Lane Multi Pass was the more laid back option for this day at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Lightning Lane Multi-Pass allowed me not to worry over wait times or stress about accomplishing everything in an efficient order. I didn’t do much backtracking or refreshing, and knocking out so many attractions earlier in the day allowed me to have a leisurely evening.
In short, LLMP this was the easiest approach to this particular day at DHS. That won’t always be the case. On busier days, my preference is Early Entry and staying late and doing standby once the crowds start to subside. There are multiple “solutions” to beating crowds and no one-size-fits-all answer. Sometimes, it actually will take more than one–meaning Early Entry plus Lightning Lane Multi Pass.
Thankfully, Lightning Lane Multi-Pass doesn’t necessarily need to involve excessive screen time, frantic refreshing, or criss-crossing the park multiple times. While there are downsides versus Genie+ (especially with the way I like to do things at DHS), the ability to arrive with 3 ride reservations in hand offers tremendous peace of mind (and will also offer strategic advantage–especially when it’s busier). Hopefully this day illustrates that LLMP can be a good tool to have in your ‘park touring kit’ for use when necessary or appropriate.
For more info and answers to common questions, see our Guide to Lightning Lane Multi Pass Walt Disney World. We’ve already updated that several times, and it’s a great jumping off point if you’re confused, overwhelmed…or fully understand the system, but want some next-level strategy to better leverage LLMP.
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Your Thoughts
Thoughts on my day in Disney’s Hollywood Studios using Lightning Lane Multi Pass? Would this be enough time savings for you to be satisfied with LLMP? Are you planning on using Lightning Lanes or sticking to free standby lines at DHS? Prefer Early Entry, LLMP, or end of day at DHS? 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!
Thanks – Hope you can do a similar article when the crowds tick up!
Thanks for this article. We were in the Parks twice this year, once in March before the change in LL and then again in August from 17-30 of this year. Seven of the days in August were in-park days. We did not use any Multi pass LL which had me worried before the trip, but after watching the wait times and much planning, I decided we would have enough days to do almost everything we wanted. We had an ADHD grandchild that was with us on the trip so we were working around the new rules hoping to make the best of it for him. Since these trips are so expensive we only purchased Single LL experiences for our top ride choices those were The Guardians of the Galaxy Cosmic Rewind and the Avatar Flight of Passage. We rode on the Avatar three times by waiting in the standby lines also. We also rode Tron by using the Virtual Que and The Seven Dwarfs Mine Train and Rise of the Resistance using the standby line. We never waited more than 30 minutes. Our biggest complaint about this entire system at WDW is in the standby line. People were constantly cutting through these long lines to “meet up with others”, we never knew if they were actually meeting up with anyone or not and it really did not matter, the Disney policy was always “Do Not get into line until your entire party is ready”! We could have been cutting these lines easily, which is B.S. and when we asked a cast member we were told that it is allowed. That is a load of crap. The lines are way to long and people should not be allowed to just skip through like that. It really turned us off. We pay too much for that garbage.
I don’t know if this applied to any of the people you encountered passing you in the line to join others, but I did read in one of Tom’s other articles that people are allowed to leave the line to go use a bathroom and then return to their group/person who is still waiting in line, which I think is reasonable. I also think this should be allowed to parents with young children or persons with special needs/disabilities who have difficulty waiting in long lines for any reason.
Not the point of the article, but this was a stark reminder that while there’s a lot of headliners at HS, there’s just not a lot of rides, period. I know I personally keep thinking about the loss of street entertainment and non-ride attractions, so it can still surprise me that you can knock out practically all of the major attractions in half the average time just by using Early Entry, rope drop, and “the ability to stay after dinner” even on a moderate (4-6) crowd day. Add in the fact that, if you get the right reservations ahead of time you can use LLMP to ride those headliners easily, and I see evidence that HS is currently not a “full day park.”
So on a 4/10 or relatively light crowd day, you’ll wait 6.5 hours of your day standing in lines only to ride 7 attractions. At $100 for a ticket, that’s approximately $14.25 per attraction not including any costs for food/beverage, parking and/or hotel, etc. When people ask me why we haven’t been to WDW in years, when it used to be at least annually if not semi-annually, these are the numbers I use to explain. We took a 10 day Mediterranean cruise/land vacation last summer to Italy and Greece and even with a balcony cabin, drink package and airfare it was less than a one week vacation to WDW staying at a deluxe resort in a studio. Not saying never again, but it is now never even close to the top option when we are deciding where to go on vacation.
Just spent a morning booking LLMPs and Single LLs for every day of our 10 day stay at WDW with park hopper tickets. It cost me a small fortune but as our first day in the parks will be September 20th and predictions have been that park crowds are going to be getting busier and busier starting mid September forward and I have physical difficulties standing in long lines I made the investment for the passes. This was a huge extra expense and I’ll have no way to know if it was worth it until I get there. I had to get up early and start booking rides at 6am Central time and had a difficult time getting through 10 days of bookings. I wasn’t fast enough and my screen kept timing out and telling me to start over. I messed up badly on one day and bought selections for only 1 person. When I tried going back in to select the same rides for my son I couldn’t line up the same ride times for both of us. A couple times I tried to go back and modify ride times and it wouldn’t work at all or would only offer me one ride at one time slot for example 9am only for Rockin Rollercoaster, and then if I tried to select that offer and continue it would keep saying selection not available, so I couldn’t actually modify anything. Most modifications problems came when I was trying to modify LLMP selections. The single Lightening Lane times were (so far) easy to modify today. Overall I found it very difficult/ confusing to book selections for so many days especially with the screen repeatedly timing out on me and having to start over. I hated having to do this on my phone. I think Booking on a website on my laptop would have been a lot easier. At one point the app just closed and refused to become active, was just a frozen opening screen and I couldn’t get it to work no matter how many times I ope and closed it even though everything else/other apps on my phone were working just fine. I restarted my phone and then the app began working again. it bumped me out and made me sign in over again a few times. All in all I had a horrible experience with this app booking rides for our 10 day holiday. I am so stressed out over todays experience booking these ride passes and worried about the expense and the selections I’ve made and hoping it all ends up being of some worth / makes our vacation easier and was not just a waste of money. I wish I had a crystal ball. I hope the app is easier to use once we get to the parks and that maybe we’ll be able to modify some selections and also add more rides when we park hop. Really really missing free fastpass right now. This enormous extra expense for ride passes along with all the other price increases and discontinued services (Disney Airport Express Bus) definitely has me thinking this may very well be our last WDW vacation. I certainly will never book an 11 nights stay again.
Tom, what does thrill use for wait times, the Disney-posted ones I assume? When I was a CM at MK waaaaaaaay back in 92, we got ripped by supervisors if they thought we were manipulating posted wait to manage crowds (we did). I usually use the Lines app for more accurate times than Disney’s app posts. I ‘need’ to go down to Gainesville for work soon, so am planning a long weekend at the World and will consider if I want to try out LLMP myself. Guess I’d better renew my AP, as it expires next Friday!
Thrill Data scrapes Disney’s system, so yes, it’s getting posted wait times. And yes, they’re inaccurate (inflated). But they are typically consistently inaccurate, meaning that they are useful in evaluating crowd levels. Not perfect, but nothing is when it comes to this sort of thing.
For whatever it’s worth, every crowd calendar in existence uses data from Disney to make its assessments. TouringPlans/Lines is more sophisticated in that it predicts what actual wait times will be, which is very useful! But it’s also useful to know what posted averages are.
When we tried to book a tier one after redeeming a tier 2, it would not let us. For example, when we tried to book Rock N Roller coaster after redeeming tower of terror, it said we “already held a booking from that group”, and we were forced to pick a tier 2. At magic kingdom, we tried to pick Peter Pan after redeeming Haunted Mansion and the same thing happened. Any idea why this would be? IT seems you had no problem replacing tower of terror with millenium falcon.
What date was this?
I’ve heard a few other people mention this issue, but I haven’t encountered it in any of my testing. I wonder if it’s a “switch” they flip on busier days…but there haven’t really been any busy days since launch.
Hopefully, it was an error of some sort. Obviously, doesn’t help you, but better for other guests going forward.
This was august 21
And 22. Magic kingdom was the 21 and Hollywood was the 22
Thanks for the article Tom……..Do you have any suggestions to maximize MMLP for those of us who don’t arrive at the parks until the afternoon? My family prefers to sleep in, hit the pool every day and then go to the parks around 3pm and stay until closing…..
Genie+ was excellent for our touring plan but it seems that MMLP penalizes those who do not go early
Sorry, LLMP
I think in that case, you just book the top 3 selections (exactly the ones I booked here), but choose times to your liking. Then after redeeming, you play the refresh game and hope for the best.
Honestly, in that scenario, I’d only buy for DHS if you’re okay only getting 3 good LLMPs (your initial selections). At least those are guaranteed, I guess?
I miss stacking already!
Thanks for asking this – I’m in a similar boat Mike! We go to WDW often and my family members are NOT morning people. Rope dropping will ruin a vacation for us (and again, we go often so we don’t need to maximize every park day). I’m sad about the lack of stacking too, and scared that on busy days, we will really miss out. 🙁
Yay for slow season! I did a two day trip aug 21-22, did animal kingdom in the morning via early entry/standby and stacked Hollywood studios for the afternoon starting at 2pm, my prebooks were tower of terror, slinky, and Toy Story mania. Was able to get smugglers, Mickey and Minnie runway, and rockin roller coaster. Could have gotten saucers and star tours too and the end of the night but I had done those via standby while waiting