How to Buy Lightning Lane Multi Pass & Make Ride Reservations at Disney World
Lightning Lane Multi-Pass is the new paid line-skipping service that replaces Genie+ to make advance ride reservations at Walt Disney World. The service is now available in the My Disney Experience app, allowing you to both buy and make selections pre-arrival or same-day. We’re here to walk you through the process for purchasing LLMP and making your first 3 ride reservations.
There are still a lot of questions about the whole Lightning Lane Multi Pass (LLMP) system, and we’ve been doing our best to answer those in the Guide to Lightning Lane Multi Pass & Single Pass at Walt Disney World. 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. However, launch day marks the first opportunity we’ve had to actually get our hands on the app feature, so a lot of that is going to change soon.
Additionally, we have updated strategy and ride rankings to get you ready to use the Lightning Lane Multi-Pass service:
- Magic Kingdom Lightning Lane Ride Ranks & Strategy
- Disney’s Hollywood Studios Lightning Lane Ranks & Strategy
- EPCOT Lightning Lane Ride Ranks & Strategy
- Animal Kingdom Lightning Lane Ride Ranks & Strategy
To start booking the new Lightning Lane Multi-Pass and Single Pass, you’ll need to update the My Disney Experience (MDX) app to version 8.01 by visiting the Apple iOS App Store or Google Play Store. You can either click those links or open the respective app stores and search for My Disney Experience.
In the release notes, here’s what Walt Disney World indicates has changed in MDX 8.01: “Starting July 24, 2024, Lightning Lane Multi Pass will replace Disney Genie+ service and Lightning Lane Single Pass will replace individual Lightning Lane entry—and add some exciting new benefits. You can purchase these Lightning Lane passes—and start choosing arrival times for experiences—days in advance (subject to availability). We also fixed bugs and improved overall app performance.”
From the My Disney Experience home page, you’ll see an option to purchase Lightning Lanes.
There are also other ways of getting to the order and ride reservation flow, from the hamburger button to the tip board. This should be fairly familiar to anyone who used Genie+ or even free FastPass+.
This is actually more similar to FastPass+, minus the free part. The biggest difference is that this is entirely app-based, and that the look user interface of MDX has changed a lot (for the better!) in the ~5 years since that was retired.
Try to do this too early and you’ll get a message that the process doesn’t open until 7:00 am EST. (Apparently, 1:40 am was too soon…but you never know with Disney IT!)
Actually, today is the only day that this message should ever appear–once Lightning Lane Multi Pass is live, it’s live. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. Well, unless they do…it kinda just happened figuratively and literally.
But the real point of showing this is to underscore that the 7 am EST start time still exists, it’s just shifted to when you’re at home. And this is a hard and fast rule, not flexible like the loading of ADRs sometimes can be–I couldn’t book until 7:00:00 am EST. Trust me, I was trying…for hours.
From there, you select the date for which you’d like to purchase and make Lightning Lane ride reservations.
Keep in mind that guests staying at an on-site Walt Disney World Resort hotel and other select hotels will be able to plan Lightning Lane passes up to 7 days in advance, for their entire stay (up to 14 days).
Off-site guests can plan up to 3 days in advance. This varies further based on admission type:
- Guests with date-based theme park tickets (which require the Guest to choose a start date at the time of purchase) can purchase 3 days before the first day of their ticket, for the total number of valid admission days on their ticket.
- Guests with other ticket types can purchase 3 days before their park visit.
- Annual Passholders can purchase 3 days before their park visit.
Guests can purchase Lightning Lane passes for days they have valid theme park admission starting at 7:00 AM Eastern Time on their first day of eligibility.
Once you choose a date, you then choose a park. Note that you’re only purchasing for one day.
If you’re buying Lightning Lane Multi Pass, you’re only doing so for a single park. The Park Hopper option, which previously cost the same price as Magic Kingdom (so $27 on this day), is gone. But for once, that’s actually a good thing. There’s now no additional charge for Park Hopping, and you do not need to pay for the Lightning Lane Multi-Pass a second time.
Once you redeem a selection on the day of your park visit, you can use the My Disney Experience app to choose another multi pass experience in any Walt Disney World theme park (subject to availability), as long as you have a valid ticket with the Park Hopper option or an Annual Pass.
From there, you have the option to purchase Lightning Lane Multi-Pass and Single Pass together in one transaction.
If you’re buying Lightning Lane Single Pass, you actually can purchase these for two different parks. My screenshot opts for Seven Dwarfs Mine Train and TRON Lightcycle Run for the sake of simplicity, but I could’ve done either of these and Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind, for example.
Once you’ve selected the maximum number of eligible options (one version of Multi-Pass and two Single Passes), every other option gets greyed out.
This is where you select which guest profiles for whom you’d like to purchase the services. (I also changed my date and unselected the Lightning Lane Single Passes since I’ve doing this for real and have no interest in buying those.)
If you’re booking outside 3 days and you have friends & family who are not linked to a resort reservation or who don’t have valid admission, you won’t have the option to select them. Instead, it’ll indicate the earliest date/time when they can make Lightning Lane selections for the desired date.
This is also the review transaction page, showing the damage–which increases for each guest you select.
After selecting profiles and reviewing the charges, you continue to select your 3 attractions.
In the case of Magic Kingdom, EPCOT and Disney’s Hollywood Studios, you have two tiers and can select 1 ride from the top tier and 2 from the second–or all three from the second, if you’d prefer that for some odd reason.
Again, once you max out your selections, everything else greys out.
I’ve chosen attractions based on the aforementioned Magic Kingdom ride rankings.
Once you’ve made your Lightning Lane selections, the system spits back results and locks those in for 5 minutes. You have that long to make modifications and complete the transaction.
To my surprise and delight, the Lightning Lane Multi-Pass system is “smart” and agrees with my assessment that the chief enemy at Magic Kingdom is not availability, but time. Meaning that you should be making as early of arrival times as possible (for at least one attraction) in order to “unlock” that 4th ride faster.
The above times would actually work perfectly with our 1-Day Magic Kingdom Itinerary and rope dropping Jungle Cruise, but I decided to modify for the sake of illustration…as that’s the whole point of this post.
To do so, you tap the “Modify Time” button and a drop-down appears with times by hour. If an hour doesn’t appear, it’s already booked up.
Since the system is smart, earlier hours are going to be gone first. Even though guests have the option of modifying (like so) and adjusting their time slots to occur later, there isn’t much incentive for doing so. I would hazard a guess that the majority of guests will stick with the default–or at least enough that earlier times are always gone first at the 7:00 am mark. (Ride reservation refills won’t follow this rule of thumb.)
I switched to 11:45 am to 12:45 pm for my Tiana’s Bayou Adventure time, which is stupid and not something I’d actually do–the initial times were perfect (for me).
Notice that I have slightly overlapping times (by 10 minutes) for Tiana’s Bayou Adventure and Haunted Mansion. This was as much as the system would let me do, which checks out.
Once finished making and modifying selections, the transaction screen shows the final price after tax.
It’ll also show your contact info (which I’ve removed) and offer payment options of gift card, Visa rewards redemption card, or debit/credit card (which I’ve also removed). It’s pretty straightforward–all autofilled if you’ve used Mobile Order or anything have a credit card on file with Walt Disney World–so I’m going to assume you know the drill there. You’ve probably purchased something online before. If not, welcome to the world wide web, I suppose.
All in all, the process of making and modifying Lightning Lane Multi-Pass selections was shockingly seamless. I know this is long and there are a lot of screenshots with accompanying text, but it took me 2 minutes to actually do this. (Minus the hours I was sitting around waiting and refreshing, hoping it’d start earlier than advertised, but that’s on me!)
My transaction was completed in only a couple of minutes, and that’s with needless modifying. I probably could’ve been done in under 60 seconds had I just gone with the default “smart” selections, which were precisely what I would’ve wanted for a real itinerary in the first place. This involved less set-up than Genie+ did (because I always modified my Tip Board for speed strategy) despite having 3 selections as opposed to one.
Honestly, it all feels a little too good to be true. Like I’m going to post this and receive a deluge of complaints about error messages, double-charges, and who knows what else. I hope that isn’t the case, but you never know with Disney IT. One thing I do know is that Walt Disney World took several extra months perfecting Lightning Lane Multi Pass before releasing it. As I’ve mentioned before, the original plan was January…which slipped to spring break…which slipped to July 24, 2024.
A half-baked product could’ve been released at any point in 2024, but it sure seems like they learned from the mistake of launching Genie+ without its full set of features, and pushed back the debut of Lightning Lane Multi Pass accordingly. While I still wish there were a web-based version of this for our international friends, the MDX version of Lightning Lane Multi Pass works really, really well. At least, it did for me. Now to put a few more hours into testing the app, followed by days/weeks/months of field testing. So stay tuned for more!
Planning a Walt Disney World trip? Learn about hotels on our Walt Disney World Hotels Reviews page. For where to eat, read our Walt Disney World Restaurant Reviews. To save money on tickets or determine which type to buy, read our Tips for Saving Money on Walt Disney World Tickets post. Our What to Pack for Disney Trips post takes a unique look at clever items to take. For what to do and when to do it, our Walt Disney World Ride Guides will help. For comprehensive advice, the best place to start is our Walt Disney World Trip Planning Guide for everything you need to know!
YOUR THOUGHTS
What do you think of the Lightning Lane Multi Pass service? Planning on using it to skip standby lines, or do you prefer not to pay even more for an already expensive Walt Disney World vacation? Do you agree or disagree with our advice? 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!
Only glitch I saw was on my iPad. It would not let me choose july 31 or any date past July 20. Luckily my grand stayed overnight with her nervous mom mom and got Tianna at 9:20 and tron at 10:20 on her phone. I ‘m hoping that possibly they might let me on tron at 8:55 am cause last year at 9:40 I had trouble climbing the hill to tron entrance in the heat.
I’m about to read your article, which I know will be wonderful, but I went to MDX earlier today, checked it out and WOW!!!!!!!!
It’s so simple.
I could never grasp Genie+. I read and re-read your many articles and just never felt comfortable with it.
But this? It’s as easy as falling off a horse. Not that I recommend that.
I love it…except for the paying part.
I really believe it’s so needlessly greedy. If Disney HAD to do it to keep their doors open I’d be ok with it.
BUT!
I can’t stake out the high moral ground claiming that I will not participate “on principle”.
Fact is, we’re fortunate, we have AP’s and go for 2 weeks at the slowest time of the year, so it will be unnecessary. One night we’re doing HS After Dark, another we’re doing MNSSHP, then we’ll also have EEH’s. Plus we’re old youngsters or young oldsters? so we can wait an hour for a ride if we choose to. We take our time and enjoy everything the parks and resorts have to offer.
We don’t have 5 kids and 4 days to get everything in.
Truth is, my name is Bill and I’m a Disneycoholic.
Come Christmas week, although we’re mainly there to check out ALL the decorations at the resorts and Parks, with the 15/10 crowd insanity that ensues form Dec 22nd to New Years Eve, I just might have to break down and purchase this thing for a day or two or three.
It worked great for me today on July 24th. I booked all of mine for AK for the morning and then a single for Tron in the evening by modifying the time. I also booked my next two days of park days all within a few minutes. Very straightforward and completed while boarding and riding the bus to AK!
Is there a way to look at availability (for research purposes) without actually having to purchase? You used to be able to with FP+, and I’m pretty sure you could with Genie (though now I’m not sure if I’m remembering correctly).
Maybe this has already been answered. But can you book different attractions for separate people in your party? We will have my 5 old daughter and mother-in-law, who would not want to do the same attractions as the rest of us. Let’s say we all want to do Peter Pan, but not all want to do Big Thunder Mtn. Can we all get the same time for PP?
I am curious about the same thing as we will have 12 of us in March and I will be the one making all of the selections. So Tom we are hoping you have some insightful information for us. I am thinking however that it would have to be separate purchases. Tom thoughts???
Can International guest use a US-Based Disney Planner and have them book the th3 LL for them? Especially if staying on site, it would be a shame for them to lose that perk.
As someone who is obsessed with riding Guardians and is staying at a resort near Epcot, I was thrilled to see that I could book Guardians as a Single Pass and then book three attractions using a Multi Pass at Magic Kingdom for the last day of my Disney trip! I can rope drop Frozen or Soarin’, potentially ride something with a low wait before I ride Guardians, and then hop to Magic Kingdom for a few hours before my early evening flight.
We have a trip booked in a few weeks so I thought I would check out the app today. I got a message saying that I cannot book a lightning lane outside the United States. Are other Canadians seeing this message too?
Have you updated the app to version 8.01?
I’ve received confirmation from two other Canadians that it worked for them–so I’m guessing/hoping you’re just having an isolated issue. Sorry I can’t be of more help troubleshooting!
Totally confused on Annual Passholder eligibility. They say 3 days, then say 7 days if a resort guest. Which is it? Also if I have a guest with date based tickets in my friends and family in MDE, although I did read the language and should be able to book us both, but as they are different tickets and , AP despite being a resort guest appears perhaps not able to do 7 days and fuzzy on date based as well for resort guests. I do apologize as just trying to get it down correctly before our trip. Thank you for any assistance.
Longest window always takes priority–just make sure their guest profiles are linked to the reservation in MDX.
I was really surprised about how well it all went today. I expected it to be hours of spinning wheels. Got all the rides I wanted at each park before noon every day with my first one starting at 9:05 so I should be able to modify and add some more things as the day goes on.
If I only pre book 2 rides for a park, can I immediately book a 3rd for any park at 7am the day of? Or when I scan into the first park maybe? Or will i still need to use one before I can book another?
We are doing 4parks/1 day in September and I don’t think Ill need to use all 3 of my pre-bookings for our first park
Totally seamless experience for me the morning of July 24. I actually mistakenly bought a single ride LL for Guardians on the wrong day. I noticed it after the purchase was complete. I was able to easily go into that LL and modify the reservation to the correct day. For those interested or purchasing soon, I am 7 days out from our trip and was able to get single rides (Tron, Guardians, Flights) at the exact times I wanted except Tron which I would have preferred in the 8PM hour but got 7PM. I also got a multiride for DHS and got Slinky, Tower, and Mania all in the morning. I logged in about 7:35 AM Eastern.
System had major glitches for me. I could not make any selections for Animal Kingdom. Not sure if attempting to buy Multi and two single lane (Avatar & Guardians) caused it, but after that was unable to book anything for 3 of the next 6 days.
Fortunately, customer service was able to fix it and give me the selections I wanted. Unfortunately, because I spent so much time dealing with it, I was unable to get the times I wanted for my day at Magic Kingdom.
But once they fix the glitches, this system will be a vast improvement over Genie+. Ideal for those who do not want to rope drop or plan an afternoon start. I just wish they would implement it at Disneyland as well.
As a UK guest who pretty much always stays on site the biggest issue for the new system will always be for me that I cannot book anything until I arrive in the US – depriving me of the perks of staying on site and the 7 day pre booking ability. To me, this is complete lunacy on WDW’s behalf. I’ve scrapped my Disney trip for next year because of it – because it introduces a level of stress and what I know will be a level of disappointment and dissatisfaction im just not prepared to pay top prices for. I’ve always been a planner and the old fast pass aryen worked a treat for us, even Genie+ was great. This is not a case where I’m not happy to pay – I am and I was. It’s being deliberately excluded from onsite perks that I detest.
Agreed. For no reason whatsoever, Disney decided to antagonize international visitors.
Just wondering if there has been any update for purchase outside of the USA and Canada. We are traveling from the UK in October and were really excited about this development until we were told we could not purchase until our arrival in the US.
We are staying at the GF and it seems we will be losing 50% of the benefit of the LLMP.
Any update would be appreciated.
TO BILL
On the MDE app where it says Annual Passholders there are 2 ** out from it. If you scroll to the bottom of that page, the ** says Annual Passholders & guests with tickets that are not date-based may purchase Lightning Lane Passes for any day within the 3 day purchase window. Then it says & this is the important part you are looking for…
WHEN STAYING AT A DISNEY RESORT HOTEL OR OTHER SELECT HOTELS, LIGHTNING LANE PASSES MAY BE PURCHASED 7 DAYS IN ADVANCE.
So to confirm, Annual Passholders can purchase lightning lane passes 7 days in advance
We’re in the parks now. Purchased for tomorrow (trying without today at Epcot) and inadvertently bought a single lightning lane for my kid who’s too short for Tron as the system didn’t let me opt him out for that one-I would have had to go through and do a second transaction as far as I can tell just for him OR do a second transaction just for Tron for the three of us. In other words, I bought MK lightning lane multi pass AND single
Passes in one transaction, and it required me buying those for everyone. I couldn’t NOT get one for the shorty, as far as I could tell. Didn’t realize the mistake until after the fact, of course. Just a heads up so someone else doesn’t waste $20! (And it’s possible I just missed a step-kids talking at me nonstop and all…)
I have done this for my little – talk to a Cast Member at the Guest Services tent. They are usually great at helping you refund the purchase.
Great-thank you! I’ll stop by a guest services kiosk today and see if they can help. With the roll out happening I think it’s been hectic some places but I’ve seen little use of lightning lanes at Epcot thus far.
Since Disney removed the multi-park option, does this mean that you can purchase the Multi-Pass for Animal Kingdom, and then book a ride at Magic Kingdom the day you are in the parks (assuming you have the park hopper) without paying an additional fee?
Yes! You have to scan in to Animal Kingdom & use the 1st multi pass that you booked & once you have used your 1st pass, you can then select passes for other parks. No guarantee on what rides will still be available for the 2nd park but yes you can do that!
Looks pretty cool, we are headed to DW in a few weeks -however we hear it is basically dead in August so have no intention of getting this service. Also we have an approach of doing early morning then back to resort and return in the evening to parks. First summer trip do hopeful the strategy works without anyone getting heat stroke. We also are trying beach club for first time because it apparently has mini waterpark if u will. Hopefully we can still purchase the ILL’s if needed
Can you score a virtual queue and allowed to buy a Lightning Lane single pass for the same ride i.e Guardians of the Galaxy, that same day?? Thanks
Annual Pass holders – at MDE it seems to say that Multi Pass cna’t be purchased until your first day – then for the next three days. The website says AP, with WDW hotel reservations, can reserve three days in advance of day one.
Can you clarify AP’s with a proper hotel reservation?
Thank you
Yep!
Yes, you can!