Is Disney Genie+ Increasing Wait Times?
A recent debate has grown aggressive as Disney fans choose sides.
Disney Genie+ immediately proved successful at Disney parks. According to Disney’s own comments, more than half of Walt Disney World guests buy it.
What does that mean for the ones who don’t? Is Disney Genie+ increasing wait times for everyone else? Here’s what we know.
About Disney Genie+
The lazy but accurate way to describe Disney Genie+ is that it’s paid FastPass.
That’s exactly what Disney did here. During the pandemic, the parks failed to bring back FastPass despite frequent questions from fans.
Eventually, executives confirmed that the parks would take a new approach. They’d offer a paid service akin to FastPass.
This new system, Disney Genie+, debuted in October 2021, a few days after Walt Disney World turned 50.
At the time, the product cost $15 at Walt Disney World. Meanwhile, Disneyland Resort added its own version for $20.
You may wonder why the price was higher there. And the answer is that Disneyland had already switched to a paid form of FastPass.
In 2017, Disneyland Resort introduced MaxPass, which allowed guests to enter the shorter line queue for a price of $15 per day.
Many but not all Disneyland Park and Disney California Adventure attractions included a MaxPass option.
Since Southern California residents drive attendance at Disneyland, park officials there felt confident they could sell a paid version of FastPass. They were correct.
Meanwhile, Walt Disney World avoided this option until 2021.
That’s noteworthy in that most other theme and amusement parks offer a paid product to skip most of the lines.
While many analysts, myself included, felt that Walt Disney World would eventually make the switch, the pandemic undoubtedly sped up the timeline.
Suddenly, guests faced a dilemma. How much are you willing to pay to wait for a shorter amount of time to experience your favorite attractions?
In other words, how much do you value your time? That question becomes all the more vital as data suggests that Disney Genie+ comes at a price.
Disneyland Wait Times on the Rise
I’ll start this discussion by noting that I pay for front-of-line access when I visit theme parks.
In fact, I stay at Hard Rock Hotel in Orlando so that I can use their Unlimited Express Pass.
I’m someone who understands the dilemma park officials face, and I’ve chosen to pay the toll, so to speak.
However, many family members and friends feel strongly that they shouldn’t, a decision I respect.
Disney has subtly made this divide more noticeable in recent years.
According to Brady McDonald of The Orange County Register (in a paywalled article), “Average wait times increased 20% from 2019 to 2022 at Disneyland and Disney California Adventure.”
McDonald cites WDWStats as the source for this information, and it bears investigation.
For starters, we should acknowledge the obvious. The pandemic has wreaked havoc with everything we thought we knew about Disney.
So, even trying to compare 2019, the last pre-pandemic year, with 2020-2022 feels a bit dicey.
For starters, we didn’t have Park Passes then. Also – and this is the huge asterisk for me – Disneyland Resort has opened multiple new attractions since then.
Specifically, Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance only operated for a handful of days in 2019. It debuted on December 5th, 2019.
I think you’d agree that Rise of the Resistance drives attendance as much as any single attraction can at a theme park.
Similarly, when Disneyland Resort reopened in 2021, Avengers Campus arrived a few weeks later.
That themed land based on the Marvel Cinematic Universe also drives attendance.
Finally, I want to highlight something essential. Disneyland Resort didn’t operate from March 14th through April 29th, 2021.
In other words, the sample size of park operations is nowhere near as large as it sounds.
The Knowns about Disney Genie+ and Disneyland Resort
Here’s what we know about Disneyland Resort. The park operated for two-and-a-half months in 2020, eight months in 2021, and all of 2022.
For roughly half that time, pandemic factors applied heavily, and you could argue that the skew is even larger.
The staffing issues, the forced social distancing, and the Park Passes temporarily changed Disney in a way that I don’t feel is fair to compare.
Realistically, I expect future analyses of Disney parks to evaluate the pandemic era as entirely its own thing.
That’s why I take the 20 percent increase in average wait times at Disneyland Resort with a grain of salt.
We’ve got too many mitigating factors, like Disney’s best attraction ever, Disney’s first Marvel themed land, and all the pandemic nonsense.
You’ll notice I haven’t once used the term “revenge travel,” either. Disney park attendance factors into this conversation as well.
Still, we can mine the data for a few useful conclusions.
For starters, the average attraction wait time at Disneyland Resort now hovers around 30 minutes.
The last reliable year for this information was 2019, when guests waited for an average of 25 minutes per Disney attraction.
In 2022, a time when normalcy mostly returned to the parks, guests spent five more minutes in line per ride, which is a 16.7 percent increase.
At Disneyland Park, here are the last four years of average waits per attraction:
- 2018 – 23 minutes
- 2019 – 23 minutes
- 2021 – 21 minutes
- 2022 – 28 minutes
I’ve excluded 2020 since it contained only 10 weeks of data, most of which occurred during the offseason.
That 2022 number definitely causes a record scratch on its own. However, Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance alone requires a 100-minute wait on average.
That raised the average wait of 20 attractions by nearly four minutes. Considerations like that are essential.
Is Disney Genie+ Increasing Wait Times?
I suspect you can tell from my comments what my answer will be. It’s simply too soon to tell.
We have too many x-factors at Disneyland Resort to distinguish how much of an impact Disney Genie+ has had.
Since that’s the only American park already employing a paid FastPass system before the pandemic, it’s the only direct comparison.
Logically, Disneyland and Walt Disney World already added FastPass more than 20 years ago.
As such, nothing new has happened here in terms of wait times, at least theoretically. The only change is that you’re paying for the privilege now.
In fact, nearly half of guests DO NOT use Disney Genie+.
So, logic dictates that, if anything, it should be less of a factor today than when FastPass was free to and thereby used by almost all.
If anything, I believe that Disney parks have had longer waits due to management’s staffing changes and other pandemic-related procedural updates.
However, my supposition doesn’t have enough data to support it, either.
In short, nobody knows for sure what’s the cause of the increased wait times at Disneyland Resort.
Maybe it’s Disney Genie+, or maybe it’s all the great new rides and amenities?
The current year, 2023, represents the first true test in the wake of the pandemic and the end of revenge travel.
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Feature Photo: Disney