Park Cris-crossing

[joyjoy]

Back in the olden days, I prided myself on using FP+ along with my park experience to most efficiently cover each park with minimal backtracking and cris-crossing. Is that even possible anymore? With genie+, it seems like you're pretty much at the mercy of the system, so planning to maximize time and minimize steps by arranging attractions on your touring plan can't really happen. Or maybe I'm missing something. What do y'all think?

 

[Micca]

Back in the olden days, I prided myself on using FP+ along with my park experience to most efficiently cover each park with minimal backtracking and cris-crossing

Same here. I think with Genie & LL you'll be doing more criss-crossing of parks.

 

[TheSouthernBelle]

I think it really just depends on the day, luck of the Genie and how well you are able to optimize it as well. We've used G+ about 10x now and I feel like some times we were more willy nilly and went all over and sideways and other times we were more focused. I definitely think we backtrack more at MK than any other park since it's larger and there's more attractions to choose from. We do not use G+ at AK or Epcot, or at least haven't yet, other than buying an iLL$ here and there.

 

[Scalemaster34]

Do not look at your step counter.....

 

[Marionnette]

Back in the olden days, I prided myself on using FP+ along with my park experience to most efficiently cover each park with minimal backtracking and cris-crossing. Is that even possible anymore? With genie+, it seems like you're pretty much at the mercy of the system, so planning to maximize time and minimize steps by arranging attractions on your touring plan can't really happen. Or maybe I'm missing something. What do y'all think?

I think that you either choose to minimize steps or minimize your waits. It's much harder to balance both with G+. The G+ rides that you're most likely to see book up the fastest are spread around the park. For MK, that would be JC, followed by PP and then BTMRR, HM and SpcMtn with SplMtn not far behind. That's not to say that you're going to tap in at JC, pull a PP LL for immediately afterwards and then proceed down the list. To make to most of G+, you might grab a JC time at 7 AM and the either do standby at lesser attractions in Adventureland until your LL (minimize steps) or head over to 7DMTR before the standby line builds up (minimizing wait).

Knowing which attractions are most likely to have G+ return times that quickly push out later in the day can help you strategize a way to get the most out of G+ but it will come at the expense of your feet.

 

[HopperFan]

Back in the olden days, I prided myself on using FP+ along with my park experience to most efficiently cover each park with minimal backtracking and cris-crossing. Is that even possible anymore? With genie+, it seems like you're pretty much at the mercy of the system, so planning to maximize time and minimize steps by arranging attractions on your touring plan can't really happen. Or maybe I'm missing something. What do y'all think?

Basically, no.

The Genie is usually on it's third Lapu Lapu before I even get in the park trying to send me every which way but near where I am. Between MagicBand and MDE it still doesn't even know what park I am in. And when I tell it, it can't figure out where I'm standing. Add in Genie+ and the inflexibility of it led to lots of sitting because it was exhausting. It gets old real fast zig zagging because you can't get times in a flow pattern.

You are right FP+ allowed you to create a steady easy flow through the parks, leaving us with more energy. Add that Standby lines are frozen in time ... we go back again next month (my 4th trip with G+) and we are already doing our mental preparation to just be happy we are there.

 

[Scalemaster34]

Back in my younger days, with the original paper FastPass.... I did a lot of "quick walking" with everyone's ticket in order to get our next available FastPass. Sometimes they'd meet me and we would ride, sometimes we would have to do another attraction in-between. But there was still some order to it. Now I really liked that system... as so few utilized it and we could do five or six major attractions.

When the first announced it, I thought they finally came up with a digital touring plan that would really help all of us..... But the problem is these parks are over capacity, there is no way to server everyone. A simple and popular attraction like Peter Pan can offer up 10K - 12K rides a day, depending on park hours. With average attendance near 30K - 50K, that is never going to work.

 

[gharter]

We have done both. Cris-crossed each park and not done that. With FP+, it was much easier to not cris-cross any given park. With Genie +, that is much more difficult as you can't modify once you have selected. Personally, walking 20,000 steps is not a big deal to do what I want. YMMV.

 

[holden]

I've used Gene+ for two trips now and did find that it requires more criss-crossing.

 

[bakenatj]

Do not look at your step counter.....

We should start a thread; "What were the most steps you have ever had at Disney." Mine was somewhere in the 20,000s.

 

[lovethattink]

We didn’t use Genie plus, just VQ at Epcot and we walked 7 miles in just over 5 hours and didn’t accomplish too much. But did what we set out to do. Soft pretzel near TT, Lunch at Regal Eagle, pin trading, pressed pennies, shopping, Club Cool, then Guardians. The walk to and from the parking lot was a trek too.

 

[_19disnA]

When we last went to Disney in 2019 and used FastPass, you could only pre-reserve 3 rides so we tried to choose things to minimize zig-zagging all over the park. You can waste a lot of time walking from one end of the park to another and can easily get worn out with all of the extra walking if you do that. Never was at Disney using the paper FastPass of the past so can't comment on how that might have worked.

Haven't been to Disney recently, but it sounds like Genie only lets you choose something every 2 hrs, so I would try to pick rides in the area of the park where you think you will be around that time. I would still try to pick things to minimize extra walking.

 

[joyjoy]

Basically, no.

The Genie is usually on it's third Lapu Lapu before I even get in the park trying to send me every which way but near where I am. Between MagicBand and MDE it still doesn't even know what park I am in.

 

[Scalemaster34]

We should start a thread; "What were the most steps you have ever had at Disney." Mine was somewhere in the 20,000s.

In May I had a 27,585 - We did AK in the morning and then Epcot that evening.

Not a lot of cris-crossing, as not much is close at either of those parks.

 

[Bomahog]

This caught my attention so went back and checked steps for nine day visit last October, 242,330!

 

[Princesca]

I think you're right. This is my main complaint with G+. I liked that I could integrate FP+ into a strategy that covered everything we wanted but minimized walking. And we STILL were practically paralyzed from the hips down by the end of the day. I'm dreading what it will be like when we go under G+, which is why I'm thinking of just not using it, rope dropping, and hoping for the best.

 

[scrappinginontario]

Some of it will depend on which LL returns a guest chooses. When booking in Jan/Feb I took the distance between attractions in mind when I had an option to choose LL with similar return times. I can't say we had more steps than an old Disney trip - but we still walked about as many each day as I currently walk in 3-4 days at home!

 

[erinch]

An off-kilter opinion here! We are day 8 into a 10 day pass, and we LOOOVE the Genie and LL. The famdamily won’t get up, so I start stacking at 7 am, and usuall have 3 LLs stacked by the time we saunter in, smack dab in the blazing heat of the day for a TS lunch, with maybe one attraction before lunch. Doing it that way meant at MK I focused on the left side, and had JC, PP and BTM stacked. PP I got by refreshing, and it was the most recent booked with a 1:00 return time, which I booked at 1 as the 3rd LL. That meant I could get Pirates, HM and splash immediately after riding the previous. Then we did the standby things and started stacking for the evening in Tomorrowland. It worked great. Fewer steps than any previous trip.

 

[jelona]

I've used Gene+ for two trips now and did find that it requires more criss-crossing.

We're planning to go the end of July... and We will have 3 people over the age of 68. One of which, we are begging to get a scooter because she has bad knees. My parents who are going can walk pretty well, but my mother can get horrible shin splints due to plantar fasciitis. I was hoping we could work our way around the park instead of criss crossing. I have a game plan with Genie+, but i know its likely to change since you can't really plan what you're going to get. It looks like i'm just going to have to mentally prepare to miss some rides...... So we can take it slow.

I never really appreciated the old fast pass system. The one where you could book ahead. We didn't have kids then and me and my husband were fine to just dart around the park and ride pretty much everything we wanted to ride.

I think genie + is perfect for people who are solo traveling, or people and groups without young kids or older grandparents. You can be more go with the flow.

Hoping maybe we can ditch the toddlers with the grandparents and get some thrill rides in!

 

[kcool]

We should start a thread; "What were the most steps you have ever had at Disney." Mine was somewhere in the 20,000s.

I had 27,242 one day last trip (December) I couldn’t tell you what we did that day. Lol Most days were a bit less that that.