The Genie Usage, Tips and Strategy ONLY Thread

[Disturbia]

We were arriving late afternoon, but AA cancelled our flights, so if flying and you’re reasonably sure you can make it in the evening, I would book 2 LLIA$ only (late evening Epcot). I think GET can help with issuing a pass for another day or something if you are unable to use them (for height restriction-FOP, ride closure, etc). Genie+ would not have been refunded.

After 2 pm the Canada/France area gets crowded (esp, during the festivals) where it took us a while to navigate the crowd. Budget 15 extra mins to get to Remy. Soarin took 30 mins with LL.

 

[Grasshopper2016]

Today is a crowd level 10 day in all four parks, according to TP. As of 1:00, LL availability is absolutely dismal. Virtually nothing available in any of the parks. Those few rides that are not sold out have return times at the very end of the day.

On the one hand, Genie+ will get you one or two skips of long lines, which is definitely worth something on a crazy crowded day. But on the other hand, Genie+ really doesn't help you to get your money's worth out of your vacation. Things were demonstrably better under FP+, where you could at least get three line skips, lined up well in advance and at the times that you desired. And that was free.

I know that this thread is only about tips and strategy, not griping or crying over spilled milk. So I guess the strategy takeaways are these:

(1) On crowded days, don't expect much from Genie+. There is no substitute for arriving very early for rope drop (and staying on site). And steel yourself for long lines no matter what.

(2) On crowded days, the best use of Genie+ is to park hop, and to use all of your LLs in your second park. You should be able to get decent selections at 7:00 and 11:00. That at least gets you two LL rides. And maybe a third, non-particularly-desirable one lined up at 1:00.

 

[AnnaKristoff2013]

Today is a crowd level 10 day in all four parks, according to TP. As of 1:00, LL availability is absolutely dismal. Virtually nothing available in any of the parks. Those few rides that are not sold out have return times at the very end of the day.

On the one hand, Genie+ will get you one or two skips of long lines, which is definitely worth something on a crazy crowded day. But on the other hand, Genie+ really doesn't help you to get your money's worth out of your vacation. Things were demonstrably better under FP+, where you could at least get three line skips, lined up well in advance and at the times that you desired. And that was free.

I know that this thread is only about tips and strategy, not griping or crying over spilled milk. So I guess the strategy takeaways are these:

(1) On crowded days, don't expect much from Genie+. There is no substitute for arriving very early for rope drop (and staying on site). And steel yourself for long lines no matter what.

(2) On crowded days, the best use of Genie+ is to park hop, and to use all of your LLs in your second park. You should be able to get decent selections at 7:00 and 11:00. That at least gets you two LL rides. And maybe a third, non-particularly-desirable one lined up at 1:00.

I am legitimately surprised that Disney hasn't scaled up LL availability with crowd levels. I'm pretty sure most guests would be ok with an extra 5-10 minutes of wait time in the lightning lanes if it means that availability doesn't go poof by early afternoon. This is a pretty big fail by Disney.

 

[leeniewdw]

I am legitimately surprised that Disney hasn't scaled up LL availability with crowd levels. I'm pretty sure most guests would be ok with an extra 5-10 minutes of wait time in the lightning lanes if it means that availability doesn't go poof by early afternoon. This is a pretty big fail by Disney.

I guess the question is, do we know they haven't? If this is a "10" day, then perhaps waits are going to be longer for everyone regardless of the line they are in.

 

[lynzi2004]

I am legitimately surprised that Disney hasn't scaled up LL availability with crowd levels. I'm pretty sure most guests would be ok with an extra 5-10 minutes of wait time in the lightning lanes if it means that availability doesn't go poof by early afternoon. This is a pretty big fail by Disney.

I won’t be surprised if they do some fine tuning before Christmas, BUT on the other hand, maybe I’ll keep my money in my pocket and just stand in line. We are going Christmas week so I’ve started taking screenshots of wait times throughout the day and watching lightening lane availability. While I would much rather have FP back, if BTMRR will stay at 60 min at 1pm during Christmas week, maybe I will just stand in line and bear it. If they start messing with # of LL given out for a time period, the standby may jump to 80-90 min and with the way the return times run, I still may not get one. Then I’m just stuck waiting in line longer, and not really getting much else out of it

 

[rmclain73]

Today is a crowd level 10 day in all four parks, according to TP. As of 1:00, LL availability is absolutely dismal. Virtually nothing available in any of the parks. Those few rides that are not sold out have return times at the very end of the day.

On the one hand, Genie+ will get you one or two skips of long lines, which is definitely worth something on a crazy crowded day. But on the other hand, Genie+ really doesn't help you to get your money's worth out of your vacation. Things were demonstrably better under FP+, where you could at least get three line skips, lined up well in advance and at the times that you desired. And that was free.

I know that this thread is only about tips and strategy, not griping or crying over spilled milk. So I guess the strategy takeaways are these:

(1) On crowded days, don't expect much from Genie+. There is no substitute for arriving very early for rope drop (and staying on site). And steel yourself for long lines no matter what.

(2) On crowded days, the best use of Genie+ is to park hop, and to use all of your LLs in your second park. You should be able to get decent selections at 7:00 and 11:00. That at least gets you two LL rides. And maybe a third, non-particularly-desirable one lined up at 1:00.

Not at the park today, but playing from home and I have been pretty successful at refreshing and getting just about everything that is no longer available. More people in the park means more changing their plans and dropping LL's.

 

[dmunsil]

I am legitimately surprised that Disney hasn't scaled up LL availability with crowd levels. I'm pretty sure most guests would be ok with an extra 5-10 minutes of wait time in the lightning lanes if it means that availability doesn't go poof by early afternoon. This is a pretty big fail by Disney.

LL already is using 80% of ride capacity (with some exceptions, mostly shows), and they apparently don’t feel they can go any higher without negative effects. The rides have the capacity they have. There’s no real way to add more LL availability without adding attractions. Increasing the park hours helps, but I suspect they’re constrained by availability of staff.

 

[wisblue]

Not at the park today, but playing from home and I have been pretty successful at refreshing and getting just about everything that is no longer available. More people in the park means more changing their plans and dropping LL's.

I would be cautious about expecting too much from refreshing.

When we were in the parks last week I didn’t want to spend a lot of time parked on the phone refreshing, but a couple of times if I was back at the resort or in a line waiting for something I tried to see if I could snag something that was either unavailable or had a return time later than I wanted.

I only tried to refresh if I was eligible to make a LL selection or if I had made a reservation that I didn’t mind losing. For example, on one day I was trying to get an evening LL for MFSR after it showed as no more availability for the day. More than once a time popped up, I clicked on it, but the next screen said there was no availability. Presumably that means that a time popped up and somebody else beat me to it.

The lesson is that just because you see a time come up when you’re playing at home doesn’t mean that you’d be able to book that time if you were on site and had purchased Genie+. And, if you had to cancel an existing reservation first and then try to get the other one, the chances that it would be gone would be that much higher, and you might not be able to get the one you cancelled back.

 

[CBMom01]

Not at the park today, but playing from home and I have been pretty successful at refreshing and getting just about everything that is no longer available. More people in the park means more changing their plans and dropping LL's.

This is 100% true. I don’t see it as anything different from refreshing to jump on fast pass+ that pops up. Just, you know, super expensive

 

[rmclain73]

I would be cautious about expecting too much from refreshing.

When we were in the parks last week I didn’t want to spend a lot of time parked on the phone refreshing, but a couple of times if I was back at the resort or in a line waiting for something I tried to see if I could snag something that was either unavailable or had a return time later than I wanted.

I only tried to refresh if I was eligible to make a LL selection or if I had made a reservation that I didn’t mind losing. For example, on one day I was trying to get an evening LL for MFSR after it showed as no more availability for the day. More than once a time popped up, I clicked on it, but the next screen said there was no availability. Presumably that means that a time popped up and somebody else beat me to it.

The lesson is that just because you see a time come up when you’re playing at home doesn’t mean that you’d be able to book that time if you were on site and had purchased Genie+. And, if you had to cancel an existing reservation first and then try to get the other one, the chances that it would be gone would be that much higher, and you might not be able to get the one you cancelled back.

Sorry refresh did not work out well for you when you were in the parks. I have to say that when I was in the parks my experience with using refresh was much better and I was always able to grab something sooner. I never would cancel a LL in the hopes to get a new one. I was always able to refresh to get something sooner prior to booking the attraction.

 

[Mango7100]

Not at the park today, but playing from home and I have been pretty successful at refreshing and getting just about everything that is no longer available. More people in the park means more changing their plans and dropping LL's.

I did a little experiment today. At 703 I got on to look at HS. Both SDD and Rise showed unavailable. Smugglers was showing 7 ish return time. I refreshed 20 times and got 4-5 SDD to pop up and 3-4 Rise. Smugglers bounced to a bit earlier. At 715 I tried again and refreshed 10 times. Got 2 SDD but never a Rise. Of course I didn’t book these so I don’t know if they would still be available in the time it takes to select and confirm… I think refreshing is harder now because you have to gamble and cancel instead of modifying like FP. Last week we had some refresh success but not nearly as much as we did with FP previously

 

[DisneyKidds]

(2) On crowded days, the best use of Genie+ is to park hop, and to use all of your LLs in your second park. You should be able to get decent selections at 7:00 and 11:00. That at least gets you two LL rides. And maybe a third, non-particularly-desirable one lined up at 1:00.

That’s my concern, that when things truly get busy you can only really get three G+LL selections….which means you are now paying $16 pp extra for what you essentially had under FP+. At least now you can get TT/Soarin’ or RnR/ToT so I can see getting some effective hop stacks….but you still have tiering because the ILL$ attractions aren’t included. G+ should be useful, but at an added price…..making it hard to view as an improvement. Take what you can get I suppose!

 

[AnnaKristoff2013]

LL already is using 80% of ride capacity (with some exceptions, mostly shows), and they apparently don’t feel they can go any higher without negative effects. The rides have the capacity they have. There’s no real way to add more LL availability without adding attractions. Increasing the park hours helps, but I suspect they’re constrained by availability of staff.

They could add more LL capacity by allowing LL wait times to increase. LL appear to move much faster then fp lines didn’t

 

[cgattis]

Anyone else have their app crash this morning for the 7am genie money grab? Booked jungle cruise right at 7. Got 940-1040. Then the app crashed. Multiple email code requests. Once it finally came back, it showed my genie JC reservation for 2pm!! A little while later it showed correct again, but keeps bouncing around. So I took some screenshots when it bounced to the correct time.
Genie + on a crowded day….so far, it’s a nightmare and, at least in my case, Disney IT couldn’t handle the rush.

Yeah, yesterday was my day. Sorry today was your day This app crashes SO much and it’s horrendous to get a signal or any WiFi in so many of the ride buildings. When you’re standing in hour standby lines and can’t make your next LL, it just gets ridiculous. I’m glad we finally got to see Galaxy’s Edge, but I’m really regretting making this a full 7-day trip and not just a weekend. We literally rode four rides at Epcot (five if you count that we did Remy twice, one BG and one ILL) in seven hours at Epcot today. Just horrendous. (Not to mention the absolute ridiculousness of having 100 food booths closed Thanksgiving week with lines an hour deep at fast food and 30+ minutes at carts.)

Also (and I know I’m way off topic), customer service has been atrocious as I’ve tried to get my dining res issues fixed because this worthless app has them locked up. Ugh.

So as far as strategy, I’d say get there at rope drop and be prepared to stand in long lines or pay $$ to maybe reduce that a little…..but don’t expect much.

 

[twodogs]

LL already is using 80% of ride capacity (with some exceptions, mostly shows), and they apparently don’t feel they can go any higher without negative effects. The rides have the capacity they have. There’s no real way to add more LL availability without adding attractions. Increasing the park hours helps, but I suspect they’re constrained by availability of staff.

If this is the capacity that they have via the LLs, then they should cap the number of G+ that they sell per day to stay in line with the expectations of buying a shorter wait time via G+. Disney has an incredible amount of data about ride through-put, they know exactly how many tickets they have sold for the day via the park reservation system (at least for the first park), and since you have to put your dates in when you buy your tickets, they can generally know how many G+ they can sell each day before the experience degrades to the point of not being worth it at all to the guest. I understand that at busier times, LLs will be more difficult to get (as it was with FP+ and MP). What I don't expect is that there is literally almost zero LL availability at 1pm in any park on a day like today (or any day). I spot checked it today, and saw the same thing as OP saw. I refreshed for MFSR about 100 tries, and nothing ever came up. I am not in the parks but we have plans to be there the weekend before Christmas. I am hoping I don't regret purchasing G+ with our tickets.

 

[wisblue]

I did a little experiment today. At 703 I got on to look at HS. Both SDD and Rise showed unavailable. Smugglers was showing 7 ish return time. I refreshed 20 times and got 4-5 SDD to pop up and 3-4 Rise. Smugglers bounced to a bit earlier. At 715 I tried again and refreshed 10 times. Got 2 SDD but never a Rise. Of course I didn’t book these so I don’t know if they would still be available in the time it takes to select and confirm… I think refreshing is harder now because you have to gamble and cancel instead of modifying like FP. Last week we had some refresh success but not nearly as much as we did with FP previously

I think refreshing might be more effective in those early minutes because others are grabbing something right at 7 and then switching to something else.

Success at refreshing obviously also depends on how much time you’re willing to devote to it and/or being lucky.

This afternoon from home I refreshed 100 times looking for something for SDD and no time ever showed up.

 

[Grasshopper2016]

they should cap the number of G+ that they sell per day to stay in line with the expectations of buying a shorter wait time via G+

Agree 100%. But Disney has already announced that G+ will never sell out. Why leave money on the table, when the whole point is to make as much money as possible?

I watched the Defunctland video posted in this thread:
https://www.disboards.com/threads/deep-dive-into-fastpass-genie-on-defunctland.3861000/
At one point, it talks about how FP+ was originally intended simply to improve the guest experience. There was no obvious way that it would increase revenues, but senior management still invested a billion dollars in it simply because it would make the parks a better place (and in the long run, happy customers are more likely to come back, and more likely to recommend the place to their friends).

How things have changed!

 

[dmunsil]

They could add more LL capacity by allowing LL wait times to increase. LL appear to move much faster then fp lines didn’t

I know that sounds like it would work, but it actually wouldn't help. In order for Lightning Lane to work, they have to match the number of reservations to the actual capacity pretty closely. If they give out 10% more LL reservations but don't actually let any more people onto the ride from the Lightning Lane, the Lightning Lane just slowly gets longer and longer and longer.

The core limitation is always ride capacity. They only have so many rides per hour for each attraction, and once the ride is at 100% capacity, that's just it. They can only allocate so much of it to Lightning Lane before things get out of whack.

Part of the reason they only give out 80% of the ride capacity is they need some extra slack to handle things like VIP tours, "anytime" passes given out when rides go down, DAS and guest recovery passes. Those use up Lightning Lane capacity as well, and when all of them put together add up to more than 100% of the actual ride capacity things really start breaking badly. Disney experimented with pushing above 80% and it was... not good.

 

[dmunsil]

If this is the capacity that they have via the LLs, then they should cap the number of G+ that they sell per day to stay in line with the expectations of buying a shorter wait time via G+.

I would go further: they should set the overal park reservations cap lower. Genie+ or no, it's unreasonable to sell so many tickets that the average guest can only experience 3 or 4 attractions in a normal day.

If there are a ton of people using Genie+, yes, they each get fewer LL reservations, but typically they are saving massive amounts of time per ride. On a day that Slinky Dog sells out in a couple minutes, the wait times can get up in the 1.5 - 2 hour range. I'm going to say that for many people, saving one 2 hour wait could be worth $15. The measure of the value of Genie+, IMO, is not how many rides you get Genie+ reservations for, it's how many minutes of line waiting you avoid.

I would be curious, actually, how much that number varies between different levels of crowding. It may be that the number of minutes in line avoided varies much less than the number of rides experienced.

 

[katyringo]

Short tik tok on refreshing.
https://vm.tiktok.com/TTPd2fAGbE/
I think if you are in the parks on a super duper busy day and LL are out.. you could use this method by pinning what you are hoping for and refresh refresh refresh.

also living by Disney reports that in DHS even though early entry is technically 30minutes- they are regularly opening rise and galaxy's edge an hour early. I still think my strategy is to early entry rope drop SDD - use indivual lightning lanes for rise and MMRR- and to make my first genie+ for TT.

I think it's worth it to get to HS EARLY.- 90 minute before official park opening.