*Updated 11/30/2024
I’m so happy to have a travel post to share! My husband and kids and I went to Disneyland and Disney California Adventure a couple of weeks ago for spring break. We were supposed to go in 2020 two weeks after the park shut down, so we’ve been anticipating this for A WHILE. We have friends heading to DL/DCA in May and July, so I’m sharing what I learned by using Genie+ before I forget the details.
1. Genie+ replaces free FastPasses with Lightning Lanes for an additional fee.
You’ve probably heard: there’s no more free Fastpasses. In fact, Fastpasses are gone completely and now and there are “Lightning Lanes” instead, if you pay $20 extra per ticket per day for for Genie+. You can pay for Genie+ when you buy your park passes or add it on later if you want to. Once we accepted that this is just how it is, that our Disneyland trip will be even more expensive (airfare, hotel, park passes for four) we decided that on the whole, Genie+ works pretty well. One of the main reasons:
Lightning Lane is available for a lot more attractions than Fastpasses were.
Attractions that have a Lightning Lane pass included with the price of Genie+:
| Disneyland Park | Disney California Adventure Park |
| Autopia Big Thunder Mountain Railroad Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters Haunted Mansion Indiana Jones Adventure It’s A Small World Matterhorn Bobsleds Milennium Falcon Smugglers Run Space Mountain Star Tours – The Adventures Continue | Goofy’s Sky School Grizzly River Run Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: BREAKOUT! Incredicoaster Monster, Inc. Mike & Sulley to the Rescue! Soarin’ Over California Toy Story Midway Mania! |
You probably noticed that the three most popular attractions in the parks aren’t included on the list. Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, Radiator Springs Racers and WEB SLINGERS: A Spider-Man Adventure offer “Individual Lightning Lanes” only. These require an additional fee over and above “regular” Genie+. As of the time I wrote this, the ILL price for Rise of the Resistance was $20 per person, Radiator Springs was $12 per person and WEB Slingers was $12 per person. Individual Lightning Lane passes do not have to be redeemed before you can book regular Lightning Lanes.
Although I swore before we left for our trip that I wouldn’t be “conned” into paying extra… we did it twice on our trip. Once for Rise of the Resistance and once for Radiator Springs Racers. What can I say except at a certain point we were like, “Are we willing to trade money for time right now?” and as we stood in the 86-degree heat and looked at 100-minute wait times for standby queues, we gave in.
Having said that, you can do those three heavy-hitting attractions without paying extra and without waiting 100 minutes if you get to the park an hour before it opens, then wait for the rope drop at the nearest possible point to the direction you’re headed. I can’t emphasize enough that you can’t fuss around if you want to do this — no stopping to wait in the 35-minute queue at Starbucks in DCA (seriously), no grabbing breakfast “real quick”! You only get one shot at the rope drop! (Cue Eminem…)
2. Be strategic about how you book your Lightning Lanes throughout the day to get the most benefit.
So here’s the basics on how Genie+ works:
- Every Genie+ ticketholder gets 1 Lightning Lane pass per attraction per day (see table above for which attractions offer LL).
- Connect your family members in the Disneyland app so that one person can book all of the LL passes at once.
- Only one Lightning Lane can be booked at a time. For example, if you book the Haunted Mansion Lightning Lane for 11:30AM, then you can’t book another one until you check in at 11:30 (I believe you have a 60 minute window to use your LL pass). Therefore…
- …As soon as we checked in for the LL attraction, we’d fire up the Disneyland app, head to “My Genie Day” and start looking at standby wait times and how far out our favorite attractions were booking. For instance, as I write this it’s 9:30AM on a Monday morning. The standby line for Smugglers Run is already 45 minutes, which is time we wouldn’t want to sacrifice during the morning when queues are shorter. I see that the standby line for Haunted Mansion is just 25 minutes so maybe we’d head over there and save our Smugglers Run Lightning Lane for later in the day (it’s currently booking at 9:35). So maybe we decide to wait for the booking windows to get a little later in the day and meanwhile hit things with a half hour wait or less until we need to stop for snacks. The thing is to keep an eye on booking windows and don’t wait too late into the day because then you’ll run out of time to use them, but don’t start too early in the day because you’ll “squander” them when standby lines are reasonable.
All of this involves a lot of looking at your phone screen. At any given time at least one of us had our head bent over a phone scanning the Disneyland app for wait times and LL booking windows. In the last hours of each day, we all had total decision fatigue. I recall standing in the queue for Indiana Jones and my husband asking, “Should we book such-and-such for [insert time here]?” and my brain was completely BLANK. “I don’t know! I literally can’t decide!” I said, crumpling to the ground as people walked over me spilling Dole Whip and powdered sugar from Mickey-shaped beignets.
3. Wait times in the app are pretty accurate, but remember that the Parks are big and everyone has access to the same information.
While we were in the park, my daughter was twice asked to carry a red card on a lanyard from where we joined the line to the very front of the line where we boarded the attraction (once on Indiana Jones, once on Star Tours) for time-tracking purposes. So we know for sure that Disneyland is trying to report wait times accurately.
However… it’s not perfect. One morning we were in the middle of a 30-minute line for Soarin’ Over California when one of the theaters broke down. The posted standby time changed to 90-minutes in an instant — I can’t remember how much longer we waited, but it was a bummer.
Another important lesson: if you’re over at Star Tours in Tomorrowland and the app shows that there’s only a 30-minute standby wait for Rise of the Resistance or Smuggler’s Run… the odds are very good that the wait will be twice as long by the time you trek over there. This is because everyone else in the Park is using the app too, and most of them are closer to Galaxy’s Edge than you are. (Don’t even get me started on the time we walked from Cars Land to Galaxy’s Edge. It took 26 minutes and of course the wait times for everything were vastly different by the time we got over there! We were so naïve!)
In conclusion, Disneyland/DCA are charging a premium for convenience with Genie+, and we’re glad we opted in.
The fact is, for out-of-staters like my family, Disneyland has always been a decadent, expensive vacation (and we don’t even stay on-property!). Also, after the 2020 shut-down, a post-Covid price hike didn’t surprise us. I’m sure some people bemoan the Genie+ change, and it was nice that FastPasses were free. But… we decided we’re fans of The New Way. Like I said, it’s nice that more attractions have Lightning Lanes and you can see what’s available in the app at any time (i.e. we could keep an eye on certain DL LL booking windows while we were eating giant pretzels in DCA). Also, you don’t have to compete with people outside of the parks for LL passes because you have to be on resort property to book them. The “My Genie Day” section of the Disneyland app is going to be your very best friend while you’re there (unless you’re having a Dole Whip. Then the Dole Whip is your BFF, obvs).
One more thing! Genie+ includes all of your Disney PhotoPass pictures, no watermarks, and you have 45 days to download them. So definitely take advantage of the Disney photographers to get shots of your whole group in the best locations! Hopefully this helps you get the most out of Genie+ on your Disneyland/DCA trip!
Update (11/2024): We went to Disneyland/DCA again in 2023 and realized that if you really want to optimize your Lightning Lanes, and you have park-hopper tickets… what you park hop each day so that you can use up your LL’s at one park and then use them up at the other park. I guess that’s getting the most out of what you pay for with the Genie+. We didn’t necessarily do this every day, but now we know that it’s an option — especially nice later in the day when the parks are busiest.
What I’m reading: I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett (book 4 in the Tiffany Aching Adventure series), and also: The Alter Ego Effect by Todd Herman.
What my 14-year old is re-reading: The Actor’s Life: A Survival Guide by Jenna Fischer. I bought it for my daughter for Christmas because she’s curious about acting as a career. I love this book – I think it’s inspiring and instructive for all creative work.
Photo: The Millennium Falcon in Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland Resort in California, at night, taken by me with an iPhone 12.