The Genie Usage, Tips and Strategy ONLY Thread

[mab2012]

I kinda think that if cancellation still resets your booking eligibility, it doesn't really allow for rolling over your multi-reservation stack, and that's the whole value. There's no point in waiting to build a multi-reservation stack unless either you're going to arrive to the park later (and that still works), or you can keep your two reservations all day by leapfrogging them. You can't leapfrog any more, so there's typically no point in deliberately creating a stack. You could just book reservations and use them during that time.

See, I think you could still set up an ongoing double stack, but in a much more restricted way. The trick would be to only book return times within 2h of the booking time, and then make sure you tap in before the 2h window is up. The cancellation makes it possible (in theory) to get to the initial setup of two active LLs, each within 2h of its own booking time.

Of course, they could be tracking the booking time of the original reservation across cancellations, but that seems a lot less likely.

I'm not suggesting that this would have much practical value (if any). Maybe it could work on a quiet day, if you're not too worried about riding a lot of headliners. But in that case, you're probably just as well off repeatedly rebooking your single LL, as intended. Still, I think it's probably technically possible, and I just like to understand these things.

What they've done here is actually quite clever. Both simple to implement and very effective.

 

[Lsdolphin]

Is there anyway to use genie + to get rides for late in the day ...we arrive on the 30th and wanted to go to MK around 5:00 and do a few rides before party starts ....I had thought I could stack every 2 hours during the day for times between 5-8 but doesn’t look like that’s possible.

 

[katyringo]

Is there anyway to use genie + to get rides for late in the day ...we arrive on the 30th and wanted to go to MK around 5:00 and do a few rides before party starts ....I had thought I could stack every 2 hours during the day for times between 5-8 but doesn’t look like that’s possible.

you can do what you said the key is if the times you need are available. You will have to watch for them and they may not be down into the evening at 7am. If you want to pay for the individual lightning lanes you can buy those at 7 and choose your times.

I am doing the same on a party day. I plan to arrive to MK around 3-4

At 7am I plan to buy SDMT and Space mountain for a 4-5pm slot

I then plan to watch genie+ return times on other rides and once they start to get to 3-4 pm I will book one.

 

[Lsdolphin]

you can do what you said the key is if the times you need are available. You will have to watch for them and they may not be down into the evening at 7am. If you want to pay for the individual lightning lanes you can buy those at 7 and choose your times.

I am doing the same on a party day. I plan to arrive to MK around 3-4

At 7am I plan to buy SDMT and Space mountain for a 4-5pm slot

I then plan to watch genie+ return times on other rides and once they start to get to 3-4 pm I will book one.

you can do what you said the key is if the times you need are available. You will have to watch for them and they may not be down into the evening at 7am. If you want to pay for the individual lightning lanes you can buy those at 7 and choose your times.

I am doing the same on a party day. I plan to arrive to MK around 3-4

At 7am I plan to buy SDMT and Space mountain for a 4-5pm slot

I then plan to watch genie+ return times on other rides and once they start to get to 3-4 pm I will book one.

how do you get the time you want...I thought the Gen + just randomly assigns you a time

 

[DavidNYC]

It's funny to me that Disney closed the loopholes on G+ and yet the analytics from today are not much different than Monday. Clearly there is a capacity issue. They simply don't have enough LL availability for what they are selling.

The more I think about this, I realize that by making certain rides ILL$, what Disney essentially did was make FP+ cost about $40 per day, not $15. The limited availability for G+ LL attractions is skewed because some of the most popular rides have been eliminated from that pool. Paying $15 does not get you the equivalent of the old FP+ setup.

Once upon a time we got 3 scheduled FP+ to start our day. We can still do that, but only if we pay more and our choices include the ILL$ rides. Everything after that is a bonus.

I wonder if the availability would balance itself out a little better if they had put rides like SDD or Test Track as ILL$ (instead of MMRR and Remy. Both are new, but not necessarily as popular as others.) If the most coveted rides were actually the pay rides, maybe the 7am first LL G+ picks would be a little more evenly spread among other rides so fewer attractions would run out so early in the morning.

Yup - and I had been predicting this from the outset. By removing those rides from Genie+, they created way too great a supply/demand imbalance. It was clear this was coming . . .

 

[DavidNYC]

how do you get the time you want...I thought the Gen + just randomly assigns you a time

Generally you can't and at busy times like this you really can't. Stacking is theoretically possibly if you just keep booking later times at 7, 11, 1 etc. But the odds of the rides you want having the availability you want seems to be getting less likely by the day. I don't predict a very happy X-mas season for cast members who have to deal with Genie+ complaints . . .

 

[acarsme123]

702am SDD sold out, Dolphin stay not recognized as on site RotR gone at 703am anyway. Got MFSR at 705am return 830pm..

Oh my god…that’s insane

 

[katyringo]

how do you get the time you want...I thought the Gen + just randomly assigns you a time

I was talking about the individual lightning lanes upgrade - those you can choose your time.

with genie+ you can't- you get next available. But you can use refresh abs watch the times

 

[GBRforWDW]

how do you get the time you want...I thought the Gen + just randomly assigns you a time

With MK, you should be able to watch and grab one of the top rides as the times are slower to progress. I'd watch jungle cruise or Peter pan depending on which one you wanted and once it got into the 5pm time period, book it. You can't choose your time but you can wait for it.

ETA: it took about 5-6 minutes for Jungle Cruise to get to the 5pm hour today. After 15-20 minutes, looks like a lot more times for earlier in the day opened back up though, so just double check the time you get

 

[Luisfba]

Where is the email coming from (what address) for those codes? I want to be sure to setup a filter to make sure they don’t go into spam.

 

[Sydnerella]

Totally agree with this post and your reply to mine. Terrible. We actually left early because it was just literally no fun. We enjoyed HS because we hadn’t been since TSL opened but the rest was miserable. I’ll be emailing Guest Relations and Billing tomorrow; today was still too fresh.

I have been at GET daily and talked to a couple non GET managers. We are STRONGLY ENCOURAGED to email and let them know our dissatisfaction.

So all of my Fellow Frustrated Thanksgiving Week Peeps - PLEASE PLEASE send a well written email outlining your experience and expectations. CMs are saying to me this is the only way it changes!

CMs are saying this is a tough week - comments range from the system needed more testing and isn’t doing well with crowds to the Maxpass model from DL works less well here due to sheer volume of guests. And as a PP said, it’s much more easy to quickly eat up the G+ capacity since it’s by phone and heavily promoted ($$$$). And another PP is correct, the new system really costs 15+15+15 (or whatever the surge pricing is for IAS LLs). So $47.95 with tax to have 3 passes before entering the park if you’re on-site.

Which was all previously included.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone! I’m thankful for this space you all create to learn, share and understand.

 

[Figment1990]

Ok, here is what I have set up for tonight. We purposely didn’t use any at Epcot this morning as we knew we wanted to focus on tonight prior to the extended evening hours after we meet my folks.

At 10am we booked Jungle Cruise 6:55-7:55
At 12pm we booked BTMRR 7:45-8:45
At 2pm we booked Haunted Mansion 8:05-9:05
(Still waiting to see if we can book anything at 4)

Based on yesterday, I don’t expect to be able to book anything after we ride Jungle Cruise or BTMRR (if we ride those before HM) but I will try to if there’s anything left and report back the results.

Thanks for being on the front lines and reporting

We’ll folks, I wasn’t able to test out which of my LLs would allow me to book another LL because by the time we got to our riding there was nothing left to book for the night despite my refreshing. We were able to grab one for pirates at 4 and Buzz at 6 so we were fine with having our 5 set up when we arrived at the park at 6:30. We rode from 7:10-9 on our LLs and then we started standby. We didn’t want to see enchantment, but we did catch the fireworks part from BTMRR which was cool!

i posted my experiences booking RotR this morning on the post about booking it at 7 in this forum. I was able to get it and DH got MFSR. The app blessedly didn’t kick me out or ask me for a code. We have never put our phones on wifi here so perhaps that’s the trick???? It did ask me for a code one time when I was using wifI on another device.
Happy thanksgiving everyone and im saying an extra thanks today for our DIS Community!

eta: I will be writing Disney later to let them know how I felt on Tuesday about them changing how the system works during the middle of my stay with no warning. Good suggestion.

 

[Sydnerella]

As of 2:20 PM today every single lightning lane in animal kingdom is gone. Not just the rides, every show too. Even animation experience, for which the fastpass is usually not even worth it, is gone. Every. Single. One. I would love to see what Disney castmembers are going to say to people who showed up in the park for the afternoon and paid money for Genie+ only to not be able to use it at all. This system is a disaster. Maybe they'll start offering LL's to kite tails.

I was at AK yesterday during this and when I cancelled and rebooked a LL for a later FORLK show as we could no longer make the initial window, the system pushed my eligibility out twohours after I made rebooking - instead of keeping my original eligibility which was 15 minutes away… so my bad - I should have known that would happen from this thread but did it anyway…

I knew that by the time the new eligibility window opened it would be slim pickings and sure enough there was nothing to book. At this time I was able to make my way to a GET stand and they helped me out getting us a LL. My account shows a LONG list of notes and guest accommodations made - I could see it on his iPad - they know what time things were booked too. Anyway… the CMs are frustrated too and generally pretty understanding if you’re honest and respectful.

BUT back to your point about the MESS….

the CMs said people entering that park that afternoon and were still buying G+ even though there wasn’t anything left to book… and the system let the purchase it. So they had been issuing refunds for many of those less informed guests…

 

[katyringo]

I played along at home this morning ad SDD didn't even last the whole minute.:

however Something I don't see talked about here but I see on the Facebook group is that around 715-730ish they seem to release more times. Not a ton but folks report refreshing around that time and getting more options for Rise, SDD etc..

 

[Sydnerella]

Have we confirmed that the expiration window hack no longer works?

It worked for us Saturday and Sunday but have not used it since.

I see posts about conflicting reports on FB and here.

Or was that related to another change?

 

[AnnaKristoff2013]

I was at AK yesterday during this and when I cancelled and rebooked a LL for a later FORLK show as we could no longer make the initial window, the system pushed my eligibility out twohours after I made rebooking - instead of keeping my original eligibility which was 15 minutes away… so my bad - I should have known that would happen from this thread but did it anyway…

I knew that by the time the new eligibility window opened it would be slim pickings and sure enough there was nothing to book. At this time I was able to make my way to a GET stand and they helped me out getting us a LL. My account shows a LONG list of notes and guest accommodations made - I could see it on his iPad - they know what time things were booked too. Anyway… the CMs are frustrated too and generally pretty understanding if you’re honest and respectful.

BUT back to your point about the MESS….

the CMs said people entering that park that afternoon and were still buying G+ even though there wasn’t anything left to book… and the system let the purchase it. So they had been issuing refunds for many of those less informed guests…

I’m sure regular genie was still pushing people to buy genie+ when there was literally no genie+ availability left.

 

[AnnaKristoff2013]

I played along at home this morning ad SDD didn't even last the whole minute.:

however Something I don't see talked about here but I see on the Facebook group is that around 715-730ish they seem to release more times. Not a ton but folks report refreshing around that time and getting more options for Rise, SDD etc..

The working theory on that is that it’s not really another drop. Rather, people who cancel or don’t finish booking have their spots re-released at chunk times instead of dynamically. So a lot of people who maybe went for a SDD reservation at 11 am only to see it’s actually 8 pm by the time they got to the checkout screen release it, things like that.

 

[GBRforWDW]

I played along at home this morning ad SDD didn't even last the whole minute.:

however Something I don't see talked about here but I see on the Facebook group is that around 715-730ish they seem to release more times. Not a ton but folks report refreshing around that time and getting more options for Rise, SDD etc..

I noticed that with Magic Kingdom as well, jungle cruise went out to at least 7pm, by 710am, then I checked back later and lots of earlier times were back open. I kept refreshing and seeing more times.

 

[katyringo]

The working theory on that is that it’s not really another drop. Rather, people who cancel or don’t finish booking have their spots re-released at chunk times instead of dynamically. So a lot of people who maybe went for a SDD reservation at 11 am only to see it’s actually 8 pm by the time they got to the checkout screen release it, things like that.

Good thought!

 

[GBRforWDW]

The working theory on that is that it’s not really another drop. Rather, people who cancel or don’t finish booking have their spots re-released at chunk times instead of dynamically. So a lot of people who maybe went for a SDD reservation at 11 am only to see it’s actually 8 pm by the time they got to the checkout screen release it, things like that.

I was going to disagree, but then I saw this post on another thread with a screenshot showing a 10 minute hold time:

W he n I booked Rise this morning I was tapping through so quickly I didn’t stop to screen shot. However, something caught my eye. So when I went back to book MMRR I was more careful and I grabbed this shot. Notice the “items held for 10 min” line at the top. That was on the payment selection screen (3rd page) I believe. First screen: pick an hour and a time and party, next screen you review your time, and then payment screen. I don’t remember if the hold for 10 min message was on the 2nd screen or not as I was kinda hurrying since my time changed from my selected time and I wasn’t sure if it could still change. However, it looks like once u move forward to payment u might have 10 minutes, like you would buying theater or concert tickets online. Supposedly. At least according to the app. At least for today.

Also, I luckily didn’t have any issues with it kicking me out this morning. We are on our Verizon data network, at wilderness lodge. I was able to get Rise, DH got us MFSR and then I went back and got MMRR after I saw his time. I’m not thrilled about paying for all this but at least I “know” we will have things we can do today and I can relax a bit and enjoy the holiday. I would not normally buy MMRR. And FWIW, SDD popped up a few times around 7:24 with various times so don’t give up hope if it’s gone right at 7. Keep refreshing for a bit.

Wonder if the Genie+ LLs also show that hold time.