Disney Genie+ and ILL$ Details & FAQ - Launches 10/19 at WDW, Paid "FastPass" at WDW and Disneyland (date TBD)

Genie vs. TouringPlans Blog if you don't want to watch the hour long video...

https://touringplans.com/blog/genie-testing-genie-and-touringplans-head-to-head/
Surprised to see today, notably in HS the "next available" LL for most rides is 2-3 hours away. I believe when I checked yesterday it was more like 1-2 hours. Slinky Dog has completely sold out again along with RoTR, and Smuggler's Run is 7 hours away (12:19pm and 7:25pm is the LL time available) - Smuggler's Run has a 70 minute standby time right now, with a Lines App expected wait of 50 minutes.

I thought buying Genie+ would be worth it at least for MK and HS where they have the most ride - but looking at this right now for a semi-crowded day (TouringPlans estimates a crowd level of 4/10 for HS today), I'm not really sure it is worthwhile. It would be easier to try and rope drop Slinky Dog, run over to ToT / RnR and try to do both of those next and then go swimming in your resort hotel or ride the shorter wait rides like Swirling Saucers, Star Tours and Toy Story Mania then relax until after dinner when the crowds seem to settle down and then go back and do Smuggler's Run, MMRR and maybe RoTR.

I thought MK might be better today (also a 4/10 for crowd level) - but its mostly the same, any of the popular rides, it is at least a 2-3 hour wait to get a Lightning Lane Pass and in most cases the Standby line is significantly shorter. For example BTMR is a 45 minute wait with an expected wait time of 24 minutes, but the earliest LL you can get is 2:50pm.

I'm not really sure paying for Genie+ is worth it as it doesn't seem to speed up your day - just allows you to wait in less lines and spend more time shopping, eating, spending more money? Disney must love that, but I'm not sure it is valuable to everyone.

The positive of all of this so far seems to be that Disney is limiting the number of passes such that it isn't horribly impacting standby waits so far. I'm not sure if customer complaints about Genie+ and ILL$ will change that - causing Disney to increase. capacity on that side of things and then negatively impacting standby times though.
 
Another video reviewing the free Disney Genie this time from the DIS - and at least right now, it seems like you get what you pay for.


Maybe all the Machine Learning they're doing just started on 10/19/21 and it will get better over time? You would think with all of the data they have, they would have started the training models before the launch. Either that or their ML models aren't very good.
 
I know we are only a few days in but what I am seeing watching from home is I have the same issue with Genie+ that I had with Maxpass at DL. By the time you get to mid-day to late afternoon there are no times left for the headliner rides included in the price. I know every day will be different and it's still hard to tell but this was my worry when it was announced. It's hard to justify the daily price when you may not be able to use it on the rides that are included.

Everyone has an equal chance to reserve the headliners in the morning.
 


Everyone has an equal chance to reserve the headliners in the morning.
Yup that is true and I am aware of that. I hope it is okay though that I was stating what I had hoped would have been different about it from my previous experiences at DL That's all I was trying to say.
 
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I'm not sure if anyone will know but for those of you who have used Genie (basic) can I call it that?😂- I know Genie is supposed to 'grant you wishes' and you can enter the top things you want to do i.e. where you'd like to eat and what you'd like to ride.

How does this work for a non park day - or it doesn't? I was trying to put in a reservation we are hoping for on our non-Park day to Genie to see what happens but since we aren't in a Park that day and don't have a ticket- it doesn't allow me to enter in the resort restaurant or any of my 'Top Picks'. Does anyone know if Genie will be able to be used on property outside of the parks? Thanks for any help!
 
Don't know if this is the place to ask, but I've been playing around with the updated MDE app on my iPhone. I'm noticing under 'my profile' that I can't load my payment method. On the website I can see my credit card and info under 'payment method', but the phone app just shows a refresh symbol and says it's can't load the payment method.

Is this a common issue?
 


Don't know if this is the place to ask, but I've been playing around with the updated MDE app on my iPhone. I'm noticing under 'my profile' that I can't load my payment method. On the website I can see my credit card and info under 'payment method', but the phone app just shows a refresh symbol and says it's can't load the payment method.

Is this a common issue?

I just tried it and it worked for me - but I know since Genie launched MDE has been hit or miss with displaying blank pages or errors when trying to load certain pages for some people.
 
I just tried it and it worked for me - but I know since Genie launched MDE has been hit or miss with displaying blank pages or errors when trying to load certain pages for some people.

Everything was working before the recent Genie MDE update, but I managed to solve the issue. If anyone is curious ...
  • Reinstalled the MDE iOS app ... NOT FIXED
  • On the Disney website ... deleted my credit card and added it back ... NOT FIXED
  • After re-adding my CC on the website I re-installed the app yet again ... WIN!
Seems like updating the payment info via the website and then re-installing caused the app to 'catch' the proper database info. I'm back in business for now
 
I thought with the one ride per attraction we would be guaranteed a pass for each ride: disney needs less inventory than fp+ given not everyone buys it and the one per ride rule.

Don't like this selling g out of the popular attractions...shouldn't happen imo.
 
I used Genie+ for the last few days of my trip, including the first day. I know it’s new and I didn’t have the hang of it very well, but I am not a fan. The top rides went fast, even at 7am, so book those first at 7am. And then hope you can book one prior to it. I don’t know if I was doing it wrong, but I had one for later in the day and I couldn’t book an earlier one, even though I saw reports of others being able to. Anyway, I probably won’t be back for two years, so hopefully, I’ll know more by then. For this trip, I feel like I wasted my money and got little value. I feel like Disney should have given a discount to those of trying it for the first time.
 
I used Genie+ for the last few days of my trip, including the first day. I know it’s new and I didn’t have the hang of it very well, but I am not a fan. The top rides went fast, even at 7am, so book those first at 7am. And then hope you can book one prior to it. I don’t know if I was doing it wrong, but I had one for later in the day and I couldn’t book an earlier one, even though I saw reports of others being able to. Anyway, I probably won’t be back for two years, so hopefully, I’ll know more by then. For this trip, I feel like I wasted my money and got little value. I feel like Disney should have given a discount to those of trying it for the first time.
Interesting. I am hoping to rope drop the rides that aren’t part of genie plus and then get our first LL for after that. Im hoping we don’t have to wait. If anyone knows how to get on a ride if you have the first one booked for later in the day, let me know! Thanks
 
Genie vs. TouringPlans Blog if you don't want to watch the hour long video...

https://touringplans.com/blog/genie-testing-genie-and-touringplans-head-to-head/
Surprised to see today, notably in HS the "next available" LL for most rides is 2-3 hours away. I believe when I checked yesterday it was more like 1-2 hours. Slinky Dog has completely sold out again along with RoTR, and Smuggler's Run is 7 hours away (12:19pm and 7:25pm is the LL time available) - Smuggler's Run has a 70 minute standby time right now, with a Lines App expected wait of 50 minutes.

I thought buying Genie+ would be worth it at least for MK and HS where they have the most ride - but looking at this right now for a semi-crowded day (TouringPlans estimates a crowd level of 4/10 for HS today), I'm not really sure it is worthwhile. It would be easier to try and rope drop Slinky Dog, run over to ToT / RnR and try to do both of those next and then go swimming in your resort hotel or ride the shorter wait rides like Swirling Saucers, Star Tours and Toy Story Mania then relax until after dinner when the crowds seem to settle down and then go back and do Smuggler's Run, MMRR and maybe RoTR.

I thought MK might be better today (also a 4/10 for crowd level) - but its mostly the same, any of the popular rides, it is at least a 2-3 hour wait to get a Lightning Lane Pass and in most cases the Standby line is significantly shorter. For example BTMR is a 45 minute wait with an expected wait time of 24 minutes, but the earliest LL you can get is 2:50pm.

I'm not really sure paying for Genie+ is worth it as it doesn't seem to speed up your day - just allows you to wait in less lines and spend more time shopping, eating, spending more money? Disney must love that, but I'm not sure it is valuable to everyone.

The positive of all of this so far seems to be that Disney is limiting the number of passes such that it isn't horribly impacting standby waits so far. I'm not sure if customer complaints about Genie+ and ILL$ will change that - causing Disney to increase. capacity on that side of things and then negatively impacting standby times though.
Tourong plan crowd calculator is wrong. Saturday was larger crowds than we had precovid at spring break. No question about it, spoke to a couple Florida residents that were stunned by the crowds and chaos after enchanted and said they had never seen anything like this. Perhaps we are wrong and it wasn’t that bad, but this weekend was NOT 4/10. Frankly a lot of TP is out of date since the reopening, from what I see, and I think the crowd calculator is off. Though the evenings during last week were quite nice, so those may have been accurate, definitely not accurate for this weekend.
 
Tourong plan crowd calculator is wrong. Saturday was larger crowds than we had precovid at spring break. No question about it, spoke to a couple Florida residents that were stunned by the crowds and chaos after enchanted and said they had never seen anything like this. Perhaps we are wrong and it wasn’t that bad, but this weekend was NOT 4/10. Frankly a lot of TP is out of date since the reopening, from what I see, and I think the crowd calculator is off. Though the evenings during last week were quite nice, so those may have been accurate, definitely not accurate for this weekend.

TP is kind of like weather predictions, they’re not always right. But they do go back and tell you what the crowd level they observed for each park was.

https://touringplans.com/blog/recent-questions-about-the-touringplans-crowd-calendar/ talks about them being off sometimes and how they predict, etc.

For Saturday 10/23/21, their prediction for the parks as a whole was a 5 out of 10, but what they saw was a 3 out of 10.

https://touringplans.com/walt-disney-world/crowd-calendar/date/2021-10-23
I don't think they necessarily look at the crowds for the fireworks though to make their determination - they do it for wait times at rides.
 
Here's my experience, we were down there the 17th-22nd, so we got a little before and after Genie launch.
The first few days we were down there, (pre genie), crowds were minimal, most things were walk ons, or a very short wait. Honestly it was one of the best ride experience days we've ever had there.

When Genie launched, crowd swelling was palpable, it seemed to be locals driving it up, just from what i was observing, i think a lot wanted to try it out.

I thought that Genie worked pretty well, definitely not the nightmare scenario many speculated about on these boards

IA$ was what I expected, for highly sought after rides, RoR in particular, it was sold out in minutes. It also had a snag in it, that wouldn't process your order the first few times you went to push an order threw, but would eventually take. It ended up costing us a wait time for 5 minutes into the future (not a big deal), but still cost us our original booking time for MMRR.

The free version was OK, but felt cumbersome, and we didn't end up utilizing it all that much, maybe to check on what time our next dining reservation was, but that was about it.

LL was good, and I would say mostly a positive, especially with a 2 year old, and the crowds swelling once Genie was launched. that being said i did have some problems
1. I was unable to book times for LL after 2PM in other parks, and we did have the hopper, unless we were physically in that park. (Maybe it was just something i couldn't find on the app, but even if it was, they should have made it easier to find/ more user friendly if that was the case).
2. I wasn't in love with the fact that I couldn't cancel an LL that i no longer needed, we booked one for Smugglers Run, but were able to walk on, so LL wasn't necessary. I can understand why Disney wouldn't allow you to do it, because unused LL work to their benefit, but I am not in love with it.
3. Some rides were booked way out in the day at 7am. One day, Slinky dog was available for LL at 5:15pm, and that was at 7:15am. Again, I understand why this happens, just not thrilled with it. I do think that, that in and of itself will start making 1/2day parks into full day parks, and that would be another win/ good thing for everyone, it would hopefully ease up pressure on MK, and Epcot.
Other than above, I really enjoyed it, and didn't even use it every day, we did Food and Wine an entire day, and didn't need it, and I liked the option of not having to pay for it on a day I didn't need it. I would wager in the future they offer it as a package for 1 flat rate for the length of your trip, kind of like memory maker now.

All in all, i give it a thumbs up
 
TP is kind of like weather predictions, they’re not always right. But they do go back and tell you what the crowd level they observed for each park was.

https://touringplans.com/blog/recent-questions-about-the-touringplans-crowd-calendar/ talks about them being off sometimes and how they predict, etc.

For Saturday 10/23/21, their prediction for the parks as a whole was a 5 out of 10, but what they saw was a 3 out of 10.

https://touringplans.com/walt-disney-world/crowd-calendar/date/2021-10-23
I don't think they necessarily look at the crowds for the fireworks though to make their determination - they do it for wait times at rides.
As far as I am aware the crowd calculator for previous dates is based entirely off wait times. WDW wait times have been overestimating last week, it at MK on the weekends they were underestimating by quite a bit on any of the rides. So unless TP has multiple people in the parks every day who actually work for them then I don’t think that they can be any more reliable that WDW wait times are, no?
 
As far as I am aware the crowd calculator for previous dates is based entirely off wait times. WDW wait times have been overestimating last week, it at MK on the weekends they were underestimating by quite a bit on any of the rides. So unless TP has multiple people in the parks every day who actually work for them then I don’t think that they can be any more reliable that WDW wait times are, no?

The Lines app allows TouringPlans members to report actual wait times themselves, I do it all the time when I'm in the parks and it helps shape their data and they do have actual people that work for them in the parks every day to sample wait times.

TP actually is relatively accurate for expected wait time versus posted wait time. It isn't perfect, but I've found it to be more accurate than Disney's wait times. Disney sometimes will shift wait times to their advantage - if they want less people to get in line for a ride, they can heavily overestimate wait times. I also noticed near closing, they stop updating wait times - so even though a ride might be a walk-on, they may still have the posted wait time at 45 mins.
 
Here's my experience, we were down there the 17th-22nd, so we got a little before and after Genie launch.
The first few days we were down there, (pre genie), crowds were minimal, most things were walk ons, or a very short wait. Honestly it was one of the best ride experience days we've ever had there.

When Genie launched, crowd swelling was palpable, it seemed to be locals driving it up, just from what i was observing, i think a lot wanted to try it out.

I thought that Genie worked pretty well, definitely not the nightmare scenario many speculated about on these boards

IA$ was what I expected, for highly sought after rides, RoR in particular, it was sold out in minutes. It also had a snag in it, that wouldn't process your order the first few times you went to push an order threw, but would eventually take. It ended up costing us a wait time for 5 minutes into the future (not a big deal), but still cost us our original booking time for MMRR.

The free version was OK, but felt cumbersome, and we didn't end up utilizing it all that much, maybe to check on what time our next dining reservation was, but that was about it.

LL was good, and I would say mostly a positive, especially with a 2 year old, and the crowds swelling once Genie was launched. that being said i did have some problems
1. I was unable to book times for LL after 2PM in other parks, and we did have the hopper, unless we were physically in that park. (Maybe it was just something i couldn't find on the app, but even if it was, they should have made it easier to find/ more user friendly if that was the case).
2. I wasn't in love with the fact that I couldn't cancel an LL that i no longer needed, we booked one for Smugglers Run, but were able to walk on, so LL wasn't necessary. I can understand why Disney wouldn't allow you to do it, because unused LL work to their benefit, but I am not in love with it.
3. Some rides were booked way out in the day at 7am. One day, Slinky dog was available for LL at 5:15pm, and that was at 7:15am. Again, I understand why this happens, just not thrilled with it. I do think that, that in and of itself will start making 1/2day parks into full day parks, and that would be another win/ good thing for everyone, it would hopefully ease up pressure on MK, and Epcot.
Other than above, I really enjoyed it, and didn't even use it every day, we did Food and Wine an entire day, and didn't need it, and I liked the option of not having to pay for it on a day I didn't need it. I would wager in the future they offer it as a package for 1 flat rate for the length of your trip, kind of like memory maker now.

All in all, i give it a thumbs up

It did seem to be a pretty good launch for Disney - I was pleasantly surprised. Definitely not perfect, but pretty smooth for a major launch. On 10/19, DAS did completely stop working from MDE for the first half of the day though and some people who had a DAS pass found that it was gone. But the majority of guests wouldn't have noticed this.

The free Genie definitely seems to need some work, I hope it gets better over time - or most people will just ignore it.

I agree with not being thrilled with Genie+ LL's being "sold out" each day like Slinky Dog - the positive side to that would be that they seem to be limiting the amount of people in the Lightning Lane, which should keep the standby line moving faster and more predictable. During the day, ride times seem to get pushed further and further out too - Smuggler's run regularly seems to be 5 hours from the current time and other rides start to get to 2-3 hours. You don't really end up saving time this way - you just get more time to do other things vs waiting in line.
 
I agree with not being thrilled with Genie+ LL's being "sold out" each day like Slinky Dog - the positive side to that would be that they seem to be limiting the amount of people in the Lightning Lane, which should keep the standby line moving faster and more predictable. During the day, ride times seem to get pushed further and further out too - Smuggler's run regularly seems to be 5 hours from the current time and other rides start to get to 2-3 hours. You don't really end up saving time this way - you just get more time to do other things vs waiting in line.
I agree, the built in logic seems to be doing its job, i didn't see anything "bogged" down at any given time during our stay, it all seemed relative based on crowd size.
 
We were in the parks Thursday-Saturday (10/21-23) and used G+ and the ILL$. We (2 adults) in only 3 lines the entire trip. We also park hopped as well.

Enjoyed not having to book rides 30 days out and feel that G+ allows for more flexibility. More like Max Pass at DL. On Friday we started in HS with a ILL$ for RoR and MMRR. Fairly early in the day our return time for RoR was extended to end day. This allowed us to also book at ILL$ for Remy.
 

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