My family recently returned from a Disney World vacation, and, because of the very big changes that Disney has unveiled recently, I thought I’d take the opportunity to write about a few of the things that we learned. And of course absolutely no change is bigger than the new Genie+ system.

Gone are the days of FastPass - when you could book 3 rides for each day, months before your trip even begins. And after that you could pretty much forget about all of the stress of booking rides when you make it to the parks. Not anymore! With Genie+ you can’t even start booking anything until the very day that you’re going into the parks, and you’re basically going to need one member of your family to be glued to their smartphone for the entire day. That’s not an exaggeration at all, and this is very important to understand.

I can’t tell you how many people I met and overheard at the parks talking about being unprepared for the new Genie+ system, and sometimes not even discovering it until after they were inside the park! Some people were actually downloading the My Disney Experience Mobile App and purchasing Genie+ while in the parks - don’t let this be you! In fact, I recommend you purchase it every night of your trip at exactly midnight - and more on that later.

What is Genie Plus?

No matter what you think about the big change from FastPass to Genie+ and Individual Lightning Lanes, it’s important to understand how this add-on purchase has practically become a necessity for your Disney experience. We went on a relatively unbusy late February-early March trip, and I’m still convinced there was no way we could have ridden everything we wanted without Genie+.

I really can’t imagine trying to navigate a busy summer day without being able to skip any lines. For better or worse, in my opinion, Genie+ is basically a required service. Therefore I suggest budgeting an additional $15 - $29 per ticket per park (price can now change each day based on demand) - with the possible exception of Animal Kingdom, but more on that later.

Genie+ lets you book (available) rides for any or all members of your party, one ride at a time, beginning at 7:00 a.m. in the morning. After you scan in for that ride, or after 2 hours have passed since you’ve booked a ride, you can then book another ride.

Another new quirk about this system is that it’s vitally important to be ready for that 7:00 a.m. booking kickoff every day. Every single park has rides that often sell out for the entire day within minutes of 7:00 a.m. Does that mean you can’t ride that ride? Of course not - but you’ll have to stand in what will probably be a pretty long line. Like I said, for better or worse, this is your life now at Disney World. Embrace the booking race!

What are Individual Lightning Lanes?

Individual Lightning Lanes (or ILLs) are something completely different from Genie+, but you can book them in the same place in the My Disney Experience app. The big difference is that these are popular rides that you pay to skip the lines for individually. If you’re staying at a resort on site, you can book these at 7:00 a.m. as well. If you’re staying off site, you can’t book them until the park opens, and, honestly, quite often it seems like you’d be out of luck.

The Individual Lightning Lane rides are supposed to be the most in-demand rides in the park, and, at the moment, each park pretty much has one or two. EPCOT has Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind, Magic Kingdom has The Seven Dwarves Mine Train and Tron Lightcycle / Run, Hollywood Studios has Rise of the Resistance, and Animal Kingdom has Avatar Flight of Passage.

The prices for an ILL are also meant to fluctuate based on popularity and demand and the time of year, so Disney does not list official prices for skipping the lines of these rides. But you can expect to pay anywhere from $7 to $25 per rider - and who knows what will happen to the prices during summer.

Yes that means a family of 4 will have to pay an additional $80 to skip the 3 hour line for Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance. Many people have voiced their frustration with this system and refuse to participate on principle. But, judging by how quickly the ILLs sell out, many people are willing to play along. Just be aware of the system, remember that it’s entirely separate from Genie+, and be ready to decide how important experiencing some of these rides are for you and your family.

Prepare to strategize for your day at Walt Disney World

A Genie Plus Booking Strategy

First of all, it’s important to note that you have to sign up for Genie Plus every day on the day you are entering the park. If you used Genie Plus in the past, you might be surprised to know that you can no longer book it in advance of your trip. You now must stay awake until midnight and buy it as quickly as possible for your entire group for each day you are in the parks.

I have heard of it selling out, so I highly recommend doing this at midnight each day of your trip. From the main menu in the My Disney Experience App, click on “My Disney Genie Day.” Select the “My Day” tab, and click on “Get Genie Plus for Today.”

After you successfully purchase Genie Plus, the rat race really begins at 7:00 a.m., and this means that it’s important to go into every morning with a little bit of a strategy. You need to identify the most popular Genie+ rides for each park (and decide if you’re going to buy an ILL that day), and be ready to book it at 7:00 a.m. If you’re planning on trying to book a Genie+ ride AND an Individual Lightning Lane ride at 7:00 a.m., I suggest having two adults with two phones logged into the same My Disney Experience account - one booking each ride.

Before your trip even begins, I recommend filling out the Disney Genie “My Genie Day” for each park in the My Disney Experience app - where you list the attractions you’re most interested in. After this, when you go to your “Tip Board” you’ll see an option to “edit selections” at the top of your tip board. I recommend checking only the very most important rides that you want to book at 7:00 a.m. That way, when you refresh at 7:00 a.m. those rides will always be at the top of your Tip Board list and save you lots of time.

Make sure to familiarize yourself with the My Disney Experience App and the Tip Board

Then, at exactly 7:00 a.m., make sure your Tip Board in the My Disney Experience app is set to the park you are going to that day, and refresh the Tip Board until you see that reservations are being taken for Genie+. Quickly click on the reservation time and make your first booking! This Tip Board is also where you can book and pay for your Individual Lightning Lane if you want, and it is where you’ll be returning all day to view wait times, see how quickly rides are booking up, and book your next rides.

After you’ve made your first reservation(s) at 7:00 a.m., it’s probably time to start heading to the park. If you’re staying at a resort on site, you get into the parks 30 minutes early, and oftentimes we were let in even earlier than that - so be there early! I think we were let into EPCOT almost a full one hour early, and we line-dropped the very popular Ratatouille with a very short line.

Walt Disney World - Hollywood Studios - Toy Story Land

No matter what time you booked that first Genie+ ride (even if it’s for 6:00 p.m.) you can book another one 2 hours after the official park opening time, and then 2 hours again after that. In other words, if the park opens at 9:00 a.m., plan on booking a new Genie+ ride at exactly 11:00, 1:00, 3:00, 5:00, etc. This way, depending on when the rides are available, you can actually end up stacking bookings for several rides close together in the evening. I absolutely love it when it works out having our most important rides scheduled for 4:00 p.m., 5:00 p.m., and 6:00 p.m. - but you have to always be ready to adapt with this system too.

Of course you can also book another ride immediately after scanning through for a previous booking. So you might end up using a strategy more like hopping from ride to ride, especially if it’s not a very busy day. If you play your cards right, you can end up skipping several more lines than the old FastPass system.

Keep in mind that you can’t rebook the same ride again, and that some rides will absolutely sell out for the entire day before others. I highly suggest that after you make that first important Genie+ reservation, you peek at your phone every once in a while to see which rides are filling up that day. You can tell this by how late the current reservation times are. If you know you still want to ride The Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Space Mountain, and Space Mountain and Pirates of the Caribbean state a Genie+ time of 2:00 p.m. and The Haunted Mansion is at 6:00 p.m., you’re probably going to want to book The Haunted Mansion next.

Before our trip, I put a lot of research into which rides were selling out the quickest, and definitely had a plan in place for which rides to book at 7:00 a.m. You can look at the parks map in the app anytime you want, actually, and maybe get a good idea for which rides have the longest lines the week of your trip. For the most part, everything we did worked remarkably well and according to plan. So I’d be very happy to let you know what our strategy was for each park at Disney World.

Magic Kingdom

Available Genie+ Lightning Lane Experiences:

Big Thunder Mountain Railroad
Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin
Disney Festival of Fantasy Parade
Dumbo the Flying Elephant
Haunted Mansion
“it’s a small world”
Jungle Cruise
Mad Tea Party
Mickey’s PhilharMagic
Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor
Peter Pan’s Flight
Pirates of the Caribbean
See Mickey at Town Square Theater
See Princess Tiana and a Visiting Princess at Princess Fairytale Hall
See Cinderella and a Visiting Princess at Princess Fairytale Hall
Space Mountain
Splash Mountain
The Barnstormer
The Magic Carpets of Aladdin
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
Tomorrowland Speedway
Under the Sea ~ Journey of The Little Mermaid

And the Individual Lightning Lanes at this park are The Seven Dwarves Mine Train and the brand new Tron Lightcycle / Run. Being brand new, Tron is the obvious choice if you only want to pay for one ILL at 7:00 a.m., but you can book and pay for both of them if you’d like and skip even more lines.

As you can see, this is the longest list of Genie+ selections for any park, making it the park that Genie+ is probably the most necessary and the most useful. Even on a relatively less busy week in February and March, lines were often longer than an hour on almost every popular ride in the park.

Walt Disney World - Magic Kingdom - The Haunted Mansion

At 7:00 a.m. we payed for The Seven Dwarves and we booked Space Mountain. If Tron was open at the time, we would have certainly paid for that at 7:00 a.m. too. And even though we booked at exactly 7:00 a.m., The Seven Dwarves was already at 2:00 p.m. and Space Mountain was already at 5:00 p.m.

We couldn’t book another Genie+ ride until exactly 2 hours after the park opened, and I knew I was going to prioritize Jungle Cruise, Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Splash Mountain because of their popularity and our interests. By the time we could book another Genie+ ride, Jungle Cruise was already at 10:00 p.m., and the line was consistently over 2 hours - so that’s the one we booked!

By that point we realized we probably wouldn’t get a Genie+ for every ride we wanted, so of course we stood in the shortest lines possible for other rides we wanted to do while we were waiting for our reservations to arrive, as well as our next opportunity to book a ride. Other very popular rides with consistently long lines are Peter Pan’s Flight and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. Just be ready to prioritize and make a decision quickly every 2 hours.

EPCOT

Available Genie+ Lightning Lane Experiences:

Disney and Pixar Short Film Festival
Frozen Ever After
Journey into Imagination with Figment
Living with the Land
Mission: SPACE – Green
Mission: SPACE – Orange
Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure
Soarin' Around the World
Spaceship Earth
Test Track
The Seas with Nemo & Friends
Turtle Talk with Crush

The big Individual Lightning Lane you can pay for in EPCOT is now the brand new Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind.

At 7:00 a.m. my family paid for Ratatouille and booked Frozen Ever After on Genie+. Other popular rides to prioritize for booking 2 hours after the park opens are Test Track and Soarin’ Around the World. There aren’t as many rides in EPCOT, so odds are you won’t have much trouble doing everything you want to do at least once - probably several times. Our son was obsessed with Test Track and we waited in line a few times with no problems.

There’s been a big change since our visit, however! Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure is now a normal Genie+ ride, and Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind has opened and is available for purchase as an Individual Lightning Lane. If we were going again right now, I would pay for Guardians of the Galaxy as an ILL, and book Ratatouille as a Genie+ ride at 7:00 a.m.

This might have ended up being my favorite day at Disney World. Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure is amazing, and we got to do Ratatouille and Frozen 2 times each because of the line-drop. Our Genie+ selections all stacked up nicely back-to-back in the evening, so it ended up showing me how nice the new service can be when everything works out really well.

Hollywood Studios

Available Genie+ Lightning Lane Experiences:

Alien Swirling Saucers
Beauty and the Beast Live on Stage
Disney Junior Play & Dance!
For the First Time in Forever: A Frozen Sing-Along Celebration
Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular
Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway
Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run
Muppet*Vision 3D
Rock 'n' Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith
See Disney Stars at Red Carpet Dreams
See Olaf at Celebrity Spotlight
Slinky Dog Dash
Star Tours - The Adventures Continue
The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror™
Toy Story Mania!

Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance is the hugely popular Individual Lightning Lane that you’re going to want to pay for if getting on the ride is really important to you. The line is always long and apparently it goes down for maintenance a lot. So you’ll definitely have to decide how important riding that ride is for you and likely pay the premium.

At 7:00 a.m. we paid for Rise of the Resistance and booked Slinky Dog Dash. For whatever reason, Slinky Dog Dash is notoriously a ride that sells out for the entire day very quickly. If there is ever a day when it really pays to have two adults on two separate phones booking rides at 7:00 a.m., this is the one. I bumped into several people that said they failed to book the rides even though they were ready at 7:00 a.m.

Walt Disney World - Hollywood Studios - Slinky Dog Dash

When you’re ready to book your second Genie+ ride of the day, consider very strongly booking Micky and Minnie’s Runaway Railway if it’s still available. It’s another spectacular new trackless ride like Ratatouille and Rise of the Resistance, and we made sure to line-drop it since we booked Slinky Dog first. Some families out there might even prefer prioritizing Minnie and Mickey over Slinky Dog - depending on your interests. But Slinky Dog does tend to disappear more quickly.

After that, think about booking Tower of Terror, Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster, Millennium Falcon, and Toy Story Mania! - in whichever order is most important to you, or proritizing whichever ones seems to have the longest lines that day or are disappearing the quickest.

Animal Kingdom

Available Genie+ Lightning Lane Experiences:

Celebration of the Festival of the Lion King
DINOSAUR
Expedition Everest - Legend of the Forbidden Mountain
Feathered Friends in Flight!
Finding Nemo: The Big Blue… and Beyond!
It’s Tough to Be a Bug!
Kali River Rapids
Kilimanjaro Safaris
Meet Favorite Disney Pals at Adventurers Outpost
Naʻvi River Journey
The Animation Experience at Conservation Station

The Individual Lightning Lane for Animal Kingdom is Avatar: Flight of Passage, and it’s another big one. I personally think it’s definitely worth paying for. Although there aren’t many rides at Animal Kingdom and simply standing in line is definitely doable.

If you’re going to skip Genie+ for any day at Disney World, Animal Kingdom is the park to do it in. That being said, we still bought it for our family, and I still think it can be worthwhile, especially on very busy days. Na’vi River Journey is a beautiful ride and it’s nice to get your rides reserved for that one, Expedition Everest, Kali River Rapids, and your safari.

Walt Disney World - Animal Kingdom - Pandora the World of Avatar

At 7:00 a.m. we paid for Avatar: Flight of Passage and we booked Na’vi River Journey with Genie+. These are by far the most popular rides in the park, especially since Expedition Everest was currently closed for us. After that, it’s probably the safari you’re going to want to guarantee. Just keep an eye on what is busy that day. And, speaking of the safari, this is the one park where my strategy failed me.

I knew we wanted to do Kilimanjaro Safaris, so I looked to book it 2 hours after the park opened. At that time, the safari was too close to our lunch time and our time for Na’vi River Journey for comfort, so I decided to wait a little longer until the safari Genie+ time was later in the day. That’s when I discovered that Disney does in fact ADD new times to Genie+ rides throughout the day, and the safari is the only time I saw this happening.

I wanted to book a safari for around 4:00 p.m., and I watched the Genie+ time slowly creep towards 4:00 p.m. all day long. 3:30, 3:35, 3:40, and then - poof! - 2:00 again. Arghh!! I kid you not, this caused me to miss at least 2 opportunities for booking a different Genie+ ride. I spent way too much time that day looking at the phone waiting for the time I wanted to appear. So take it from me, never sit around for hours waiting for a ride to hit the time you want. Disney could throw new available times into the mix at any time and ruin your plans. Just take what is available and adapt!

Luckily for us we started the day off right by booking Na’vi River Journey and Avatar: Flight of Passage first thing in the morning. After that I would prioritize getting in your safari time quickly, and then waiting a couple of hours until you can do rides like Expedition Everest, River Rapids and Dinosaur.

Final Word on Genie Plus and Individual Lightning Lanes

People are definitely split on how they feel about the change from FastPass to Genie+, and tons of people are even more grumpy based on principle about paying for the Individual Lightning Lanes and what it means for the future. But, all in all, we had a good experience with the new system.

Yes, you have to buy it at midnight, and, yes, you have to start your day a little earlier with the 7:00 a.m. rat race, and, yes, you have to be glued to your phone all day (and watch your battery). But a small part of me enjoyed learning the new system and executing the plan well. And we ended up skipping many more lines than the 3 we used to get with FastPass.

It’s highly possible everybody will be singing a different tune after the crowded peak days of summer. Will the costs of Individual Lightning Lanes go up even further? Will people struggle to book more than 3 Genie+ rides on busy days? Only time will tell. Since it’s an additional cost that didn’t exist before, hopefully Disney continues to ensure that it helps people ride more rides than FastPass ever did. And I sincerely hope the thoughts and experiences of our family help you make the best of your trip and get on all the rides your family wants to do!

Do you have a vacation planned for Disney World soon, or did you just get back? What was your experience with Genie+? Let us know how it goes and if any of our plans worked for you in the comments!