I’ve been to Walt Disney World nearly every year since 1986. I’m not saying this to brag or anything. I just want to point out my transformation over the years from Disney World hard nosed, commando park touring addict to the more relaxed park touring addict that I am today. I visited Disney World before FastPasses existed and then once it came out, I learned to maximize its use so that we did everything we wanted to do with little to no wait. Plus, FastPass and then FastPass+ was included in the price of your park admission tickets. It was awesome.

Then in 2021, Genie+ was introduced (for a fee) and “free” FastPass+ went away. Annoying? Yes. Deal breaker for me? No. I have always planned well enough that even if I had no FastPasses at all, I was still able to do the things my family wanted to do without waiting in long lines the entire time. There were a few times that we ended up waiting for a ridiculously long time for a ride but those were definitely choices (that I may or may not have at least partially regretted after the fact). I knew I could still do Disney without buying Genie+ plus and I’d have to decide whether I wanted to purchase it or not eventually.

During my October 2023 trip with my friend Marci, we didn’t plan to use Genie+. Then after Marci had an accidental fall in Animal Kingdom (I’ll have to cover that in a separate post), Disney World Cast Members gave her 2 Lightning Lanes for each of us since we were on the same reservation. Obviously it’s great being able to use Lightning Lanes to bypass the long Standby lines and basically walk right onto the rides. To make a long story short, Marci decided to buy us Genie+ for the rest of the trip. It was a love/hate relationship for me. Or I guess it was more of a like/dislike relationship.

The only thing I liked about Genie+ is the most important: you get Lightning Lane access for certain rides so that you can skip the Standby line and have a shorter wait in line. I use my cell phone a lot and I don’t mind having to use it while at Disney World, so I wasn’t bothered by that aspect. Where things start to get dislike-y for me is in getting the Lightning Lanes. And this doesn’t even include needing to pay even more for Individual Lightning Lanes for the rides that are not included with Genie+. We had multiple instances where we selected a return time for a ride only to have the time either change in the 2 seconds it took to finalize the selection, or to have the finalized time later on get changed to a time 30-45 minutes later from the time we selected and had already confirmed. This didn’t cause any issues since we didn’t have table service reservations anywhere, but it was annoying. We’d both be ready to head for our Lightning Lane only to look in the My Disney Experience app and notice the time was now later than it had been.

Another thing I didn’t like was that the Standby wait times seemed to often be a lot less than what was actually posted. I’ve seen a lot of people talk about experiencing this when they were at the parks ever since Genie+ began, but for us there were a few instances where the Standby wait time would show as around 30 minutes but we either walked right on or only waited 15 minutes or so. Even though this wasn’t directly related to buying Genie+, I just think that Disney sometimes overestimates wait times to encourage people to buy Genie+.

Ok, so why am I saying I’m probably going to buy Genie+ for my next Disney World vacation if I really only liked one thing about it? Well, it’s like I said before, getting access to the Lightning Lanes is the most important thing to me. Can I navigate the parks and ride things without using Genie+ or Individual Lightning Lanes? Yep. Do I want to pay extra per person to get Lightning Lanes or Individual Lightning Lanes? Nope. But as of right now, it’s worth it to me to get Genie+ so that I can ride everything I want to ride with shorter waits and still go back to my Disney resort hotel for a break in the afternoon before heading back to the parks in the evening. Since the parks have been increasingly busier, and my upcoming trip is going to be during a busier time for sure, it just makes sense for me to buy Genie+. Once I use it for that trip, I’ll have to see how it goes and decide whether or not to use in for a trip in a historically slower time frame.

The Genie+ service is a little convoluted, but I definitely recommend reading up on it on Disney World’s website and watching their How To Videos about it. You can start our HERE