A former Touring Plan Pro's thoughts about Genie+

[aggiedog]

... One time when we arrived, there was a queue all the way past the boat dock that we initially thought was the general admission queue, but one of the guys in line near us walked up front to check it out and it turned out that it was a separate queue for a special group. So we were able to walk around them and enter. I'm not sure if you would have been able to bypass that insane queue if you had tried.

When we got off the gondolas, we went to the front to ask, with our friend who had recently had knee surgery and was walking with a cane. We were told in no uncertain terms to "go to the back of the line!" without any question of whether we were with the race. When I questioned that my friend would have to stand for that long (he's been renting ECV's in the park, but can't park hop with them) they agreed to let him wait for a courtesy wheelchair first.

We found out as we made it back up to the front that they were letting folks from the boat dock bypass the line and enter. And like I said, once we got to the front, they were announcing "non-race participants" can bypass the line. I'd say 20% of the people around us in line were not part of the race and none of us were happy we'd been made to wait just to find out we really didn't have to. It was really poorly managed.

 

[bullcat_02]

G+ works great. I don't find myself looking at my phone all the time. We tend to try an "stack" return times for late afternoon and night. So I just book my 7am time and ILL times, then set a 2 hour alarm on my phone. And keep doing that cycle all day long.

Have had no problem lining up our night with 7 or 8 return slots starting at 4 or 5.

I don't mind paying for it as it is a time saver for sure. Disney can keep raising prices for a bit before I tap out. I hope the higher prices start to reduce crowds soon.

I leave in 8 days. How do you get times for 4 or 5pm at 7am? Outside of Slinky does anything really move that fast? I'm talking only about G+ not ILL.

 

[set88]

I leave in 8 days. How do you get times for 4 or 5pm at 7am? Outside of Slinky does anything really move that fast? I'm talking only about G+ not ILL.

Remy.

Otherwise, I'd advise not checking until 7:30am when the app actually starts showing return times in the morning. See if anything is out that late at MK. Check periodically and eventually something will be.

You can book something right up until park opening and not be behind the curve at all. So technically, you could not even check the app until 8:29am, book something for 4pm, then be ready to book your next reservation right at 10:30am with everyone else. (Adjust those times if park opening is earlier or later.)

(For AK unless it's an 11/10 day it will be hard getting anything to have a return time that late before park opening. But it doesn't really matter since there are only two competitive rides anyway - Navi and Safari. And you can easily pick them both up for late afternoon in the early afternoon. Everything else will likely have immediate returns all day, so you can just book when you're ready to ride it.)

 

[Gehrig1B]

Have had no problem lining up our night with 7 or 8 return slots starting at 4 or 5.

Interested to know how this is possible with the current system.

If you started using your lightning lanes at 4:00, with the system currently in place, that means you secured one LL before park opening then, if the park opened at 8:00 as an example, you could get another at 10, 12, 2 and 4... That is a maximum of 5 LLs. Am I missing something?

I suppose you could try to get more after you scan in at 4 or 5 but in our experience, all the E-rides are gone by late afternoon, early evening. But you definitely could not stack 7 or 8 prior to 4:00 unless I do not fully understand the system.

 

[set88]

Interested to know how this is possible with the current system.

If you started using your lightning lanes at 4:00, with the system currently in place, that means you secured one LL before park opening then, if the park opened at 8:00 as an example, you could get another at 10, 12, 2 and 4... That is a maximum of 5 LLs. Am I missing something?

I suppose you could try to get more after you scan in at 4 or 5 but in our experience, all the E-rides are gone by late afternoon, early evening. But you definitely could not stack 7 or 8 prior to 4:00 unless I do not fully understand the system.

If you count an ILL, you could get to 6 reserved rides before 4-5pm. If you also count what you can pick up at the park after you start using the stacked ones, you could get to 7 or 8 total for the day. I got 6 total at HS on a busy (7/10) day this week - 7 if the Rise ILL was counted.

But you're correct that there's no way to get more than 5 Genie+ LLs booked before 4 unless you start using them earlier in the day. So I'm assuming they are counting what they could get booking while there as well.

 

[Orsino]

A question for everyone - is the IG way more crowded in general now that the highliner is dropping people off there? It was a total cluster when we went, or was that due to the after race party influx?

We stayed at beach club earlier this week and did not encounter any lines at the international gateway. I was worried because someone mentioned long lines before our trip. I was braced for long lines in the morning, but encountered none. We had at most two groups in front of us at the tap point.

 

[Heather1101]

And this is exactly why G+ doesn't work for us. We have no desire to stay in the parks all day even if that is what Disney wants.

We tried G+ last year for one day and never again for us. We are doing a short trip later this month because we had left over tickets. We are planning for no G+ and no ILL. We are DVC and have a week booked in February but we don't plan to do any park days. We did the same two years ago. So now we will use our DVC but it is a new game to see how little money we can give Disney. Our actual vacation budget is spent on other destinations. We would have happily paid the money if it was the old FP+ system but instead they have lost one more family.

We are not stay in the park all day people either and with or without G+ that is what our trip last week looked like. We usually go to the parks until lunch and leave until dinner so we can rest and swim at the resort and shop. This time we cancelled 3 table service meals as we were not able to make them based on ride wait times or we were too far away or just too tired to deal with it. We didn't eat or shop as much as we used to because we were in lines or waiting for rides all day. We all disliked the reservations and hopping system. That didn't work for how we like to do Disney. There were a lot more misses than hits this trip that just made it seem like Six Flags with different theming. The current climate of Disney parks has made us decide we aren't going back after 30 years of Disney vacations. It felt a bit sad but honestly it was nice to have one last hurrah and we all feel we have finally satisfied that Disney bug and can move on. I honestly wished we had gone to Hawaii again instead but it was nice to spend all of our Disney dollars we had saved up (we had 5 years worth as we hadn't been to Disney World since 2017) and be done with it. I still love Disney and always will but the parks are no longer my happy place and not how we like to vacation. With as much money as you spend there it is no longer worth the price tag for us.

 

[DSLRuser]

Interested to know how this is possible with the current system.

If you started using your lightning lanes at 4:00, with the system currently in place, that means you secured one LL before park opening then, if the park opened at 8:00 as an example, you could get another at 10, 12, 2 and 4... That is a maximum of 5 LLs. Am I missing something?

I suppose you could try to get more after you scan in at 4 or 5 but in our experience, all the E-rides are gone by late afternoon, early evening. But you definitely could not stack 7 or 8 prior to 4:00 unless I do not fully understand the system.

you don't stop getting LL's at 4pm......still get them every 2 hours, and the last one can go even faster. 7-8 is the norm for sure.

 

[Karnor00]

I have a similar experience about Genie+. It just seems so much worse than the old FP system. Previously I could get up early once, about 2 months before my vacation and get my FPs booked. I could then plan my days around which rides I managed to book - plus I could try to get them in adjacent time windows to maximise convenience.

With Genie+ I have to get up at 7am to book one really popular ride - and there's limited choice which timeslot I can get because they move so fast.
Then I get to book another ride at about 10.30am (depending when the park opened) by which time all the really good rides are gone. So I'm having to settle for something less popular - but the window still could be hours away. By the time I'm booking my third ride there's typically not much left.

And the final bitter pill is that I'm having to pay extra for all this inconvenience!

The only way I found it tolerable was to keep refreshing at 7am to try and get a late afternoon timeslot for my favourite ride. Then during the day I would try and line up my next choices for a similar time slot.
I'd then spend my morning at a different park (getting no benefit from Genie+) so that I could park hop in the afternoon to go on the rides that I'd painstakingly set up earlier. But it certainly didn't add to the fun.