The Five Eras of FastPass Through Lightning Lane

Midway through the summer of 1999, Walt Disney World introduced a new option for vacationers.

As soon as theme park guests tried this free service for the first time, they were hooked.

Of course, “free” isn’t a word that corporations like. This statement especially applies to Disney’s competitors.

They noticed Disney’s idea and adopted it for themselves. But they monetized the concept, pressuring Disney to follow suit.

Disney held the line for more than two decades, but then one infamous Disney executive changed the course of Disney history.

Today, let’s talk about the five eras of FastPass, up to and including the current Lightning Lane system.

Paper FastPass

Some of you just sighed wistfully as you fondly reminisced about the good old days.

I’ve seen this look many times, as I have family members who were there at the time and started visiting Disney more often because of these FastPasses.

In its earliest days, FastPass provided elegant simplicity to park guests.

You would walk to a FastPass kiosk for an attraction, which would dispense a ticket.

This was your paper FastPass, and it provided you with an hour-long return line for a participating attraction.

Guests loved this system due to its user-friendly nature.

For 44 years, Disney theme parks had trained tourists to stand in line as long as it took for a particular attraction.

That practice changed with FastPass.

Suddenly, you could enter the FastPass queue and experience an attraction much more quickly.

The system was flawed from the start, as it used connecting terminals.

These systems ostensibly forced guests to wait two hours before acquiring another FastPass.

However, several attractions didn’t connect with the main terminal.

So, people gamed the system by grabbing those FastPasses and thus enjoying many more attractions than park officials had intended.

Even worse, during the early days, used FastPasses were still functional, allowing repeat visits.

Summarizing, this was the most customer-friendly Disney product imaginable, which is why fans remain so sentimental about it.

From Disney’s perspective, it was a nightmare.

They had designed this free service to improve theme park distribution.

Alas, the rampant abuse of FastPass negated many of those benefits.

In tennis terms, it was Advantage: Customer. In business terms, Disney didn’t like that.

Still, Disney grudgingly looked the other way for a while, waiting for something better to come along.

FastPass+

A decade later, Disney committed to a new forward-thinking initiative.

The company committed more than one billion dollars toward My Magic Plus.

While this system involves much more than FastPass discussions, we can still reduce its core benefits to two – wearable technology and digital attraction queuing.

Disney introduced the system in early 2013, and Wall Street marveled at its genius.

Fast Company lauded My Magic Plus as the winner of its Innovation By Design Award.

We take it for granted now, but in 2013, the idea of using a MagicBand for theme park and hotel entry seemed like wizardry.

My wife and I watched in amusement as people attempted to use the tech for the first time.

Thankfully, this technology was also user-friendly, although it experienced some hiccups at first.

At the end of the day, tapping a wearable against a kiosk pad is something even the dumbest person you know – yes, them – can do.

Longtime Disney fans immediately bristled at the notion of My Magic Plus due to its theme park implementation, FastPass+.

Personally, I view FastPass+ the way that one of my siblings perceives paper FastPass.

To me, the My Disney Experience app streamlined Disney vacations.

Suddenly, I could book FastPasses in advance and build complex itineraries, knowing that I’d be able to book at least three of my favorite attractions.

Disney phased out paper FastPass once it gained confidence in FastPass+.

The idea was the same, but My Magic Plus removed most of the loopholes of paper FastPass.

Disney converted the tech such that an increasingly smartphone-dependent audience could do everything online.

While paper FastPass loyalists bristled at the change, FastPass+ maintained the essential element of its predecessor.

The service was free.

MaxPass

Everything changed with MaxPass in 2017.

Those of you loyal to Walt Disney World barely even know what this is.

Disneyland introduced MaxPass as an existential threat to FastPass+.

At their core, they were both virtual queuing systems performed online. However, MaxPass cost money.

In 2017, fans vocally resisted the idea of paying $10 a day or $75 a year for full access to MaxPass.

In other words, they wouldn’t pay what amounted to 21 cents a day for a FastPass service.

I’m one hundred percent serious when I say that every Walt Disney World and Disneyland fan would return to those halcyon days of pricing.

Still, fans innately understood what this service represented.

Disney had taken one small step toward charging for the former FastPass service.

Walt Disney World maintained its free option until the pandemic closed the parks in 2020.

That’s when this story takes a turn.

Disney Genie+

In March of 2020, Disney theme parks closed due to the pandemic.

When they reopened in July of 2020, the Walt Disney Company was hemorrhaging money.

It has spent $71.3 billion to purchase Fox’s media assets less than a year before then.

Suddenly, Disney was losing most of its revenue, and Disney officials knew that the parks would remain empty due to social distancing rules for the foreseeable future.

Recently promoted CEO Bob Chapek had formerly run Disney’s theme park division.

He’d always felt that the company could have monetized several free services. If not, Disney could have cut them entirely.

During his two-and-a-half-year tenure as Disney CEO, Chapek eliminated Magical Express and introduced Disney Genie+.

I’m Mr. Optimism by nature, yet even I was a harsh critic of Disney Genie+.

The product caused more problems than it solved for everyone but Disney’s CFO.

Disney eliminated one of the staples of FastPass+, pre-vacation bookings.

Instead, guests awoke and started booking Disney Genie+ at 7 a.m. on the morning of their visit.

The service was expensive, quickly increased its prices, and rarely fixed its flaws.

Once Bob Iger returned as CEO, he asked Parks Chairman Josh D’Amaro to fix some of the gaping flaws with Disney Genie+.

While D’Amaro gave it the old college try, everyone involved in the decision eventually realized that they just needed to start from scratch.

I will remember Disney Genie+ as paid FastPass, where the financial experts made the decisions rather than the park planners.

Still, I will credit Disney for one modest change.

Just before the service ended, Disney finally allowed pre-vacation bookings, something that NEVER should have gone away.

Lightning Lane

In 2024, Disney rebranded Disney Genie+ with the name it should have had all along: Lightning Lane.

With Disney Genie+, guests entered the Lightning Lane.

Also, Disney sold Lightning Lane, which was somehow a different thing.

Oh, and the parks also introduced a virtual assistant named…Disney Genie.

It had literally nothing to do with Disney Genie+. Seriously, this thing was so scattershot it felt like a lost dare.

Disney knew there was no saving Disney Genie+, which had such a strong negative stigma it was beyond redemption.

So, now we have three versions of Lightning Lane, which I swear all make sense.

Lightning Lane Multi Pass is akin to conventional FastPass; however, a handful of Disney’s premier attractions aren’t available.

For those, you must pay per experience via a product known as Lightning Lane Single Pass.

The only attractions in Single Pass are the best of the best, like Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance and Tron Lightcycle / Run.

As of October 30^th, we have Lightning Lane Premier Pass.

For $129 to $449 per person, guests may utilize any Lightning Lane line once per day.

The other versions of Lightning Lane require a return time, forcing guests to build entire itineraries around them.

So, in a way, in October 2024, guests pay hundreds of dollars a day for the feature Disney introduced as FastPass 25 years ago.

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