anyone else hoping to go in July 2022?
- Thread starter disneyholic family
- Start date
). We are actually hoping there 21 day ticket comes back and we can just upgrade. Thanks again
Lyndylou
Mouseketeer
- Joined
- May 8, 2005
Our thoughts exactly. What dates are you going ?i tried to call yesterday to ask this very question but the phone wait was over 2 hours.
I'll try again today.
I'm wondering whether i can buy the 14 day ticket now and if the 21 day or AP becomes available whether i can upgrade it.
stress stress stress
disneyholic family
disney on my mind....
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2002
we're there all of july from the 1st to the 31st
but part of the time we'll go to universal and on a short cruise...
we were hoping for the 21 day ticket..
but i doubt they're bringing it back any time soon..
Plague
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Jun 14, 2020
I think the 18 day flex in the 14 day Magic is intended to make the 21 day redundant, so I think you are right. I'm sure Disney have done their homework.
disneyholic family
disney on my mind....
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2002
it doesn't make the 21 day redundant for anyone coming for 21 days (or really anything longer than 14 days).
It means you can go into the parks on 14 days. That leaves another 7 days.
But i'm pretty done with disney at this point given the whole genie+ debacle.
I am so not looking forward to everything that we're going to have to endure when we're there in july.
I'm quite sure this will be our last trip to WDW for a very very very long time.
disneyholic family
disney on my mind....
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2002
from Bloomberg, for your reading "pleasure"
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-system-sees-flaws-errors-customer-complaints
in case you're hit with a paywall, here's the article:
Disney’s New Line System Is Driving Parkgoers Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Bonkers
Visitors wish the theme parks would put their Genie+ system, which debuted in 2021, back in the bottle. "This app has made my life a living hell," reports one guest.
Daryl Austin
March 4, 2022, 4:15 PM GMT+2
In the five months since Walt Disney Co. announced the replacement of its 22-year-old FastPass system with the app-based Genie+, the Magic Kingdom has gone for some guests from being “the happiest place on earth” to one of the angriest ones.
Genie+ is meant to help visitors cut down on the parks’ famously long wait times and is offered at both Walt Disney World in Florida and Disneyland Resort in California. But the verdict from vocal parkgoers so far is that the service is too expensive, creates longer wait times for nonusers, is riddled with technical issues, and requires users to be glued to their phones to reap any benefits.
A family of four can expect to pay an additional $60 to $240 per day on top of the price of admission simply to cut a few lines—a perk that used to be free with the former FastPass system.
“I know it’s supposed to make my trip easier, but this app has made my life a living hell,” says Ava Martinez of Hoover, Ala., who visited Disney’s Hollywood Studios recently with her husband and two children.
She wasn’t the only one complaining.
The service has drawn objections on social media since its inception, with more than 100,000 people signing a petition seeking to oust Disney Chief Executive Officer Bob Chapek within weeks of the service’s launch in October 2021. Since then, a bevy of issues have been well documented by travel agencies and savvy Disney bloggers—two groups that ordinarily support the beloved brand.
Bonnie Sawyer, a travel agent in Phoenix who has long specialized in planning Disney vacations, says the product is “very unpopular” among her clients for many reasons, foremost being the steep price tag.
“Disney has been creatively nickel-and-diming their loyal customers for many years,” she says. “But for most people I talk to, Genie+ has been the final straw.”
The Genie’s Technical Issues
Here’s the quick primer on how Genie+ works. Anyone who downloads the Disneyland or Disney World app on the iTunes or Google Play stores gains access to a free service called Disney Genie, which helps guests navigate the parks with location-based dining recommendations and real-time updates on wait times for attractions. The paid Genie+ add-on costs $15 per person per day at Disney World and $20 per day at Disneyland, and is the ticket to actually cutting those queues via its so-called “Lightning Lanes,” formerly known as “FastPasses.” Signup for Genie+ happens daily within the app.
In practice, the fact that Genie+ is activated on a day-by-day basis forces parents—and other, less-bedraggled adults—to plan on the fly, through the day, starting early in the morning. Lightning Lane reservations open at 7 a.m., and users can secure them for only one ride at a time. A second reservation becomes available two hours after the parks open to the general public, at 9 a.m. Lightning Lane bookings can then be made every two hours, or after the previous one has been redeemed, whichever comes first.
Sound complicated? It’s also the starting point for a lot of things to go wrong.
For starters, not all Lightning Lane reservations are included in the base Genie+ price. Cutting the line for popular attractions can cost an additional $7 to $20 per person, per ride, depending on when you travel and which park you’re visiting. While you’re allowed to hold up to two of these “premium” reservations at a time, they tend to sell out almost immediately after becoming available.
As such, this is a system that requires not only time and money but also luck.
“I was ready to go before the sun came up—and refreshed and refreshed because the app wasn’t working,” says Sandy Chapman, a cosmetologist from St. Petersburg, Fla. “By 7:03 [a.m.], all the big rides were gone.”
“The only way I got any fast passes was by babysitting the app all day long to snag rides as they became available. It was exhausting,” Chapman adds.
Mark Williams, a software engineer from Nashville, had other technical struggles. “It wouldn’t load any times or let me select any members of my party,” he explains. (The issue persisted through his multiday visit, although Disney offered a partial refund for one day.)
Adding salt to the wound for many is the fact that the previous system was user-friendlier and didn’t cost a penny. “I spent $120 for my family to get access to the same FastPass system that used to be free, and all I got to show for it was a shorter wait time at Winnie the Pooh and Aladdin’s Magic Carpets,” says Amy Turner, a mother of three from Fresno, Calif., who visited the Magic Kingdom last month with her sister’s family.
What’s more, inaccurate wait time estimates on the app have caused some to purchase Lightning Lane passes for rides whose lines may not have been very long to begin with.
However, many of the parks' most popular attractions are still priced a la carte: $15 per guest to skip the line of Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, $14 per guest for Avatar Flight of Passage, $10 per guest for Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, and $9 per guest to bypass the line at Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure.
And those are dynamic prices. When the parks are particularly busy during holidays and weekends, passes can climb $2 to $5 apiece to reach as high as $20 on select rides such as Radiator Springs Racers at Disneyland. With Disney anticipating peak crowds over spring break and beyond, those “peak” figures will likely become commonplace charges.
Multiple parkgoers said the costly early mornings and the inability to have anything substantial to show for their efforts started their days off on the wrong foot. “You know it’s going to be a rough morning when you haven't even gotten into the park yet and you’re already pissed off," says mother-of-two Martinez.
Asked to respond to the criticisms, a Disney spokesperson tells Bloomberg: “After just five months, we’ve received great guest feedback but continue to listen and find ways to even further enhance this new service and deliver a great experience.”
Escalating Costs
Disney seems to be listening, if the company’s service adjustments are any indication. The spokesperson tells Bloomberg that beginning last week through Aug. 7, Disney World would be including three attractions in the basic Genie+ fee that had previously required an additional fee: Space Mountain, Frozen Ever After, and Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway.
Steve Davis, a food service manager from Plano, Texas, says he spent nearly $600 on the base level of Genie+ over the course of a week for his family of five, plus $300 on a la carte ride reservations. “Every ride we went on cost almost as much as taking my whole family out to a night at the movies back home,” he says. The alternative—waiting in line for two to three hours per attraction—wasn’t feasible. “I already paid a fortune to get my family to [Disney World]. I didn’t want to waste it standing in lines all day,” he explains.
Those costs add up for Disney, too. In the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report in November, Disney boasted a revenue increase in the parks division of $5.5 billion, up from $2.7 billion from a year earlier. On the company’s most recent earnings call, CEO Chapek cited higher park attendance, hotel room rate increases, and “the introduction of Genie+ and Lightning Lane” as contributing to the increase. One Disney blogger’s back-of-the-envelope calculation is that Genie+ alone might rake in $300 million for the company this year.
Few Are Happy, Except the Shareholders
Even for Disney employees and customers who don’t buy in, Genie+ can create headaches. Guests without the fast passes, for instance, might jump into an apparently short line, only to be bypassed by hordes of people arriving with Lightning Lane passes, and staff funneling both sets of customers into a single line. One Disney employee who was advertising a 130-minute wait time for the popular roller coaster Slinky Dog Dash at Disney’s Hollywood Studios put it this way: “If it wasn’t for the Lightning Lane, this would only take half an hour, but the standby line is constantly interrupted by a stream of people with [virtual] return times.”
Park employees end up dealing with the angry aftermath. “I thought guests were angry about having to wear [face] masks all last year, but that was nothing compared to the complaints I hear all day about Lightning Lane issues,” says an employee working near the Avatar Flight of Passage attraction at Disney's Animal Kingdom, who requested not to be named for fear of reprisal.
“Everyone who bought [Genie+ access] is mad because it doesn’t work like they want it to, and everyone who didn’t buy it is mad because they have to wait in longer lines,” the worker continues. “Pretty much the only people not angry are the shareholders."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-system-sees-flaws-errors-customer-complaints
in case you're hit with a paywall, here's the article:
Disney’s New Line System Is Driving Parkgoers Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Bonkers
Visitors wish the theme parks would put their Genie+ system, which debuted in 2021, back in the bottle. "This app has made my life a living hell," reports one guest.
Daryl Austin
March 4, 2022, 4:15 PM GMT+2
In the five months since Walt Disney Co. announced the replacement of its 22-year-old FastPass system with the app-based Genie+, the Magic Kingdom has gone for some guests from being “the happiest place on earth” to one of the angriest ones.
Genie+ is meant to help visitors cut down on the parks’ famously long wait times and is offered at both Walt Disney World in Florida and Disneyland Resort in California. But the verdict from vocal parkgoers so far is that the service is too expensive, creates longer wait times for nonusers, is riddled with technical issues, and requires users to be glued to their phones to reap any benefits.
A family of four can expect to pay an additional $60 to $240 per day on top of the price of admission simply to cut a few lines—a perk that used to be free with the former FastPass system.
“I know it’s supposed to make my trip easier, but this app has made my life a living hell,” says Ava Martinez of Hoover, Ala., who visited Disney’s Hollywood Studios recently with her husband and two children.
She wasn’t the only one complaining.
The service has drawn objections on social media since its inception, with more than 100,000 people signing a petition seeking to oust Disney Chief Executive Officer Bob Chapek within weeks of the service’s launch in October 2021. Since then, a bevy of issues have been well documented by travel agencies and savvy Disney bloggers—two groups that ordinarily support the beloved brand.
Bonnie Sawyer, a travel agent in Phoenix who has long specialized in planning Disney vacations, says the product is “very unpopular” among her clients for many reasons, foremost being the steep price tag.
“Disney has been creatively nickel-and-diming their loyal customers for many years,” she says. “But for most people I talk to, Genie+ has been the final straw.”
The Genie’s Technical Issues
Here’s the quick primer on how Genie+ works. Anyone who downloads the Disneyland or Disney World app on the iTunes or Google Play stores gains access to a free service called Disney Genie, which helps guests navigate the parks with location-based dining recommendations and real-time updates on wait times for attractions. The paid Genie+ add-on costs $15 per person per day at Disney World and $20 per day at Disneyland, and is the ticket to actually cutting those queues via its so-called “Lightning Lanes,” formerly known as “FastPasses.” Signup for Genie+ happens daily within the app.
In practice, the fact that Genie+ is activated on a day-by-day basis forces parents—and other, less-bedraggled adults—to plan on the fly, through the day, starting early in the morning. Lightning Lane reservations open at 7 a.m., and users can secure them for only one ride at a time. A second reservation becomes available two hours after the parks open to the general public, at 9 a.m. Lightning Lane bookings can then be made every two hours, or after the previous one has been redeemed, whichever comes first.
Sound complicated? It’s also the starting point for a lot of things to go wrong.
For starters, not all Lightning Lane reservations are included in the base Genie+ price. Cutting the line for popular attractions can cost an additional $7 to $20 per person, per ride, depending on when you travel and which park you’re visiting. While you’re allowed to hold up to two of these “premium” reservations at a time, they tend to sell out almost immediately after becoming available.
As such, this is a system that requires not only time and money but also luck.
“I was ready to go before the sun came up—and refreshed and refreshed because the app wasn’t working,” says Sandy Chapman, a cosmetologist from St. Petersburg, Fla. “By 7:03 [a.m.], all the big rides were gone.”
“The only way I got any fast passes was by babysitting the app all day long to snag rides as they became available. It was exhausting,” Chapman adds.
Mark Williams, a software engineer from Nashville, had other technical struggles. “It wouldn’t load any times or let me select any members of my party,” he explains. (The issue persisted through his multiday visit, although Disney offered a partial refund for one day.)
Adding salt to the wound for many is the fact that the previous system was user-friendlier and didn’t cost a penny. “I spent $120 for my family to get access to the same FastPass system that used to be free, and all I got to show for it was a shorter wait time at Winnie the Pooh and Aladdin’s Magic Carpets,” says Amy Turner, a mother of three from Fresno, Calif., who visited the Magic Kingdom last month with her sister’s family.
What’s more, inaccurate wait time estimates on the app have caused some to purchase Lightning Lane passes for rides whose lines may not have been very long to begin with.
However, many of the parks' most popular attractions are still priced a la carte: $15 per guest to skip the line of Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, $14 per guest for Avatar Flight of Passage, $10 per guest for Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, and $9 per guest to bypass the line at Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure.
And those are dynamic prices. When the parks are particularly busy during holidays and weekends, passes can climb $2 to $5 apiece to reach as high as $20 on select rides such as Radiator Springs Racers at Disneyland. With Disney anticipating peak crowds over spring break and beyond, those “peak” figures will likely become commonplace charges.
Multiple parkgoers said the costly early mornings and the inability to have anything substantial to show for their efforts started their days off on the wrong foot. “You know it’s going to be a rough morning when you haven't even gotten into the park yet and you’re already pissed off," says mother-of-two Martinez.
Asked to respond to the criticisms, a Disney spokesperson tells Bloomberg: “After just five months, we’ve received great guest feedback but continue to listen and find ways to even further enhance this new service and deliver a great experience.”
Escalating Costs
Disney seems to be listening, if the company’s service adjustments are any indication. The spokesperson tells Bloomberg that beginning last week through Aug. 7, Disney World would be including three attractions in the basic Genie+ fee that had previously required an additional fee: Space Mountain, Frozen Ever After, and Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway.
Steve Davis, a food service manager from Plano, Texas, says he spent nearly $600 on the base level of Genie+ over the course of a week for his family of five, plus $300 on a la carte ride reservations. “Every ride we went on cost almost as much as taking my whole family out to a night at the movies back home,” he says. The alternative—waiting in line for two to three hours per attraction—wasn’t feasible. “I already paid a fortune to get my family to [Disney World]. I didn’t want to waste it standing in lines all day,” he explains.
Those costs add up for Disney, too. In the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report in November, Disney boasted a revenue increase in the parks division of $5.5 billion, up from $2.7 billion from a year earlier. On the company’s most recent earnings call, CEO Chapek cited higher park attendance, hotel room rate increases, and “the introduction of Genie+ and Lightning Lane” as contributing to the increase. One Disney blogger’s back-of-the-envelope calculation is that Genie+ alone might rake in $300 million for the company this year.
Few Are Happy, Except the Shareholders
Even for Disney employees and customers who don’t buy in, Genie+ can create headaches. Guests without the fast passes, for instance, might jump into an apparently short line, only to be bypassed by hordes of people arriving with Lightning Lane passes, and staff funneling both sets of customers into a single line. One Disney employee who was advertising a 130-minute wait time for the popular roller coaster Slinky Dog Dash at Disney’s Hollywood Studios put it this way: “If it wasn’t for the Lightning Lane, this would only take half an hour, but the standby line is constantly interrupted by a stream of people with [virtual] return times.”
Park employees end up dealing with the angry aftermath. “I thought guests were angry about having to wear [face] masks all last year, but that was nothing compared to the complaints I hear all day about Lightning Lane issues,” says an employee working near the Avatar Flight of Passage attraction at Disney's Animal Kingdom, who requested not to be named for fear of reprisal.
“Everyone who bought [Genie+ access] is mad because it doesn’t work like they want it to, and everyone who didn’t buy it is mad because they have to wait in longer lines,” the worker continues. “Pretty much the only people not angry are the shareholders."
Last edited:
luvpoohandcompany
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Sep 30, 2009
This is such a sad but true statement for so many of us.
my thoughts exactly. Unfortunately
disneyholic family
disney on my mind....
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2002
Can you believe it????????????
we're now less than two weeks from July (and we're actually flying on june 29th).
I am in SHOCK!!!
We're so close now.
It's been so long since we've traveled, i'm feeling completely out of my element.
I'm trying to remember all the 'stuff' that needs doing before we go.
I'm sure to forget something!!!!
I CAN'T BELIEVE IT!!!!
we're almost there!!!
we're now less than two weeks from July (and we're actually flying on june 29th).
I am in SHOCK!!!
We're so close now.
It's been so long since we've traveled, i'm feeling completely out of my element.
I'm trying to remember all the 'stuff' that needs doing before we go.
I'm sure to forget something!!!!
I CAN'T BELIEVE IT!!!!
we're almost there!!!
MichelinMan
I Am Speed - Ka-Chow!!!!
- Joined
- Apr 16, 2009
Yep, less than 3 weeks from now and I'll be there - flying out on the 6th July.
Lyndylou
Mouseketeer
- Joined
- May 8, 2005
We are heading out 28 days today. We are all super excited. Trip postponed from April 2020 to August 21 and then to July 22. And now finally
Heading to boardwalk for 28 days. (Staying a night at airport hotel first night in Orlando as we don’t get in till late and I didn’t want to waste the points or the day soo a full 28 days and nights in Disney ) Here’s hoping the next 28 days go fast but the following 28 days go super slow.
disneyholic family
disney on my mind....
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2002
We are heading out 28 days today. We are all super excited. Trip postponed from April 2020 to August 21 and then to July 22. And now finally
amazing!!!!! safe travels!!!
we have 19 nights at BLT, 2 nights at beach club villas, 4 nights at kidani, then the 4 night Disney Wish cruise, then back to kidani just for 2 nights until our flight.
That's a month.
Arriving on june 30 and leaving on july 31.
But with only 14 days in the disney parks. That was the only ticket available, so that's what we took. I'd hoped for the 21, but it is what it is.
We're using the other days for universal, kennedy space center and shopping.
nursejackie
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Oct 11, 2014
We have the same Avatar
disneyholic family
disney on my mind....
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2002
Just finished our 14 days at the disney parks and are now at universal for a few days.
The crowds at both WDW and universal are intense!!!
Seems as if all of Europe, the UK, and South America have jumped on planes and flown here.
I have never seen such massive crowds
The crowds at both WDW and universal are intense!!!
Seems as if all of Europe, the UK, and South America have jumped on planes and flown here.
I have never seen such massive crowds
disneyholic family
disney on my mind....
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2002
i just realized i never responded to your question.
When the parks are as crowded as they were when we were there, Genie+ is necessary but not entirely useful.
what i mean is, you get your first 'big ride' (e ticket ride) at 7 am, but after that, if you're not staying past midafternoon, there really aren't any other big rides left.
also, we bought genie+ as an add on to our 14 day ticket back when this was possible.
so because we paid in advance and paid a discounted price, i was less annoyed at how useless it sometimes was.
but is WDW still magical? Occasionally, but not nearly as much as before.
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