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The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2025 Updates (as of August 2024)
The Unofficial Guide to the New Lightning Lane System
You can trust that the Unofficial Guide series will always provide the latest unbiased, detailed information about Walt Disney World. For our in-depth coverage of the new ride reservation system (Lightning Lane Multi Pass and Lightning Lane Single Pass), click here to download our digital companion to the 2025 print edition. It tells you everything you need to know about the new system, which incorporates elements of both the previous system (Genie+) and the old FastPass+ system.
GOODBYE, GENIE+ AND WELCOME TO THE NEW LIGHTNING LANE SYSTEM
SINCE THE FINALIZATION of the 2025 edition of The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World, Disney has made significant changes to its ride reservation system. What were previously called Genie+ and Individual Lightning Lane are now referred to as Lightning Lane Multi-Pass (LLMP) and Lightning Lane Single-Pass (LLSP).
These changes affect more than the names. Not only do they alter how you might go about your days in the parks, but they also change how you may need to plan and pay for things in advance. In this digital companion to the 2025 print edition, we explain all about LLMP and LLSP—how they work, how to decide whether to use them, and how to maximize your use of them if you choose to purchase them.
WHAT IS AND IS NOT CHANGING
IN THE UNOFFICIAL GUIDE TO WALT DISNEY WORLD 2025, we present an introduction to Genie+ and Individual Lightning Lane, including rules, strategies, recommendations, and time savings. Not all of these recommendations are suddenly moot. In fact, all of the individual attraction time savings shown in the theme park chapters are still very much applicable. What is rapidly changing are things like availability of reservations throughout the day, overall time savings across a day, and strategies for what to book and how to make the most of LLMP.
The basic premise remains the same: You are paying extra for the opportunity to use a separate queue (the Lightning Lane) instead of the standby line at certain attractions. You still have to make reservations for specific attractions at specific times, and when that return window is open, you will be admitted to Lightning Lane.
PRICING
ANOTHER THING THAT HASN’T CHANGED is overall pricing. Pricing is still dynamic—that is, more-crowded days will be more expensive than less-crowded days, and more-popular parks and attractions will be more expensive than their less-popular counterparts—but there wasn’t any sort of overall price adjustment with the rollout of the new system. LLMP prices at each park are roughly similar to what they were with Genie+, and LLSP prices are virtually identical to what they were for Individual Lightning Lane.
A new bonus of LLMP is that park-hopping is built into the cost of every purchase.Previously, a multi-park Genie+ purchase was always the same price as the most expensive individual park (usually Magic Kingdom). Now, the price is based on the park where you make your three advance selections, but as soon as you unlock new reservations during your park day, they can be used at any theme park, regardless of the initial price you paid.
Additionally, pricing for LLMP and LLSP is now locked—and searchable 21 days in advance. You can open up the My Disney Experience (MDE) app and see what the price is going to be from tomorrow through the next three weeks. With Genie+, pricing was a surprise until the day you purchased. Now, since you can pay and book reservations in advance, Disney has to lock in the price in advance too. This will help budgeters and planners.
RIDE RESERVATIONS
RIDE RESERVATIONS NOW WORK like Advance Dining Reservations: Once your booking window opens, you can book ride reservations for the entire length of your vacation—you won’t have to wake up at 7 a.m. every day to buy Genie+ and book your first return time for the day. Instead, you’ll wake up three or seven days before your vacation begins and decide what you’re going to buy and your first three LLMP reservations for each day of your vacation all at once.
If you’re staying at a Walt Disney World resort, your ride reservation booking window opens at 7 a.m. Eastern time, seven days before you check in at your resort (if you’re doing a split stay, your entire vacation unlocks seven days before you check in at your first resort). You can book LLMP and LLSP reservations for every day of your vacation, as long as your vacation lasts no more than 14 days.
If you’re staying off-site but have a date-based ticket, your booking window opens three days before the first day that your ticket is valid. And you can book LLMP and LLSP reservations for every day that your ticket is valid. If you have an Annual Pass but are not staying at a Walt Disney World resort, your booking window opens three days before your park reservation or three days before any passholder good-to-go day (where reservations are not necessary). If you have multiple park reservations on consecutive days, this does not mean you get to book for every consecutive day in your plan. You’ll have to check back and book three days before each park reservation.
ADVANCE SELECTIONS
THE BIGGEST DIFFERENCE between Genie+ and the new Lightning Lane System is that you now have the ability to book return times in advance. If you visited Walt Disney World during the era of FastPass+, you’ll be very familiar with the advanced selection process. Instead of waiting until your park day and making selections as you tour, you’ll be able to pre-book three LLMP ride reservations and up to two LLSP ride reservationsfor every day of your vacation once your booking window opens.
Even more importantly, you’ll be able to look at reservation availability and lockdown timing before you even buy LLMP or LLSP for the day. Once your booking window opens, you’ll select a day during your vacation for which you’d like to make LLMP or LLSP reservations. We recommend booking LLMP days at Hollywood Studios first, followed by LLMP days at Magic Kingdom, rather than going in calendar order. This will help you snag some of the more-popular attractions before the seven-day window opens for other guests.
After you select a day, you’ll pick which park you want to make LLMP selections for (if applicable) and which LLSP attractions you’d like to book. As soon as you confirm these selections, you’ll be asked to confirm the members of your party. Everyone you select will have the same advance selections. If you selected LLMP as one of your options, once your party is confirmed, you’ll be taken to a screen that instructs you to pick three attractions for LLMP. If you’re choosing selections for Animal Kingdom, you’ll be able to pick any three attractions that offer the service. At the other three parks, you can only pick one Tier 1 attraction—your other selections must be from Tier 2. This is to help spread out demand so that not all popular attractions totally book up while less-popular attractions lie around with no one picking them. This was how FastPass+ worked. Tier 1 and Tier 2 options are shown in the Lightning Lane Attractions in Each Park in the Advance Selection Strategy chapter below.
Once your selections are made, Disney will recommend return times for all three LLMP selections and up to two LLSP selections. Initially, these return times will be as early as possible without overlapping, and they will be locked in for up to 5 minutes as you decide whether you want to modify the times or make your purchase. If you choose to modify the times you’re given, you can select any other available return times throughout the day. This process is remarkably smooth, and it’s great to be able to tinker with your day before you make your purchase. After you finalize your initial return times and purchases, you’ll quickly be able to move on to any other day in your vacation.
ADVANCE SELECTION STRATEGY
WHEN YOU START BOOKING GLLM RESERVATIONS for your trip, it’s important to have an idea of which advance selections will fit well with your touring style, save you time, and set you up for a successful day of LLMP use in the park. To get the most for your LLMP money, there are several things to consider before you book.
First up is Animal Kingdom. LLMP is almost always unnecessary here, thanks to the relatively few attractions that offer it (or need it). You can easily avoid waits by rope-dropping or staying later in the day. But if you do purchase, the easy top picks are Na’vi River Journey, Kilimanjaro Safaris, and Kali River Rapids (in the summer) or Expedition Everest (in the winter).
For all other parks, you want to make the best use of your Tier 1 selection because this is where Disney has stuffed all the best time-saving attractions . . . along with some filler. At Hollywood Studios, you should either choose Slinky Dog Dash or Rock ’n’ Roller Coaster. Both have similar time savings.
At EPCOT, if you have an Early Entry rope drop from the main entrance, you should book Remy (and rope-drop Frozen). If you have an Early Entry rope drop from the International Gateway, you should book Frozen (and rope-drop Remy). If you don’t have Early Entry, pick whichever is more important to you. Just don’t pick Soarin’.
At the Magic Kingdom, things get more complicated. Tiana’s Bayou Adventure sells out quicker than any other attraction at any park, but it also has more regular capacity “refills” throughout the day, and it offers a virtual queue (at the time of this writing). We recommend not picking it as an advance selection. Instead, grab it during the day at 45 minutes past almost any hour, when return times tend to be refilled. Opt for Jungle Cruise, Peter Pan’s Flight, or Space Mountain, depending on what isn’t being refurbished and what makes sense with your rope-drop strategy.
Tier 2 is where things get more interesting. One thing that is blindingly clear about LLMP is that you will get the most value out of it by quickly using and getting more return times as frequently as you can throughout the day. So you obviously want to save time with your attractions, but you also want to prioritize getting one return time as early as possible—ideally within 30 or 40 minutes of park opening. Why? As soon as you use a Tier 2 selection, you can immediately book another attraction—from either tier. An early Tier 2 redemption means you’ll get the first chance at booking the remaining Tier 1 availability at other attractions in the park.
We like to call the most-effective Tier 2 strategy “burning and churning.” This means you’ll use one of your Tier 2 selections as a good time-saver, no matter the return time. But the second selection will be a burner that might not necessarily save much time but will have an early return time and a short attraction duration so that you can “burn” it and then start “churning” through other attractions during the day. The table below shows some good selections for Tier 2 time-savers and burners based on data available at the time of writing.
Of the burners listed in the table, pick the one that has the earliest return time and is close to the attractions you plan to rope-drop—having an early return time isn’t helpful if you have to hike halfway across the park just to use it.
USING LLMP in the PARKS
ONCE YOU HAVE YOUR ADVANCE SELECTIONS, all the hard work is done, right? No! The good news is you’ve set yourself up for success. The bad news is you’ll have to keep paying attention during the day to keep making good use of LLMP. Unlike with Genie+, visitors do not automatically unlock new reservations after a certain amount of time. There is no more 2-hour rule. Instead, you unlock a new reservation as soon as you use one.
And tiers don’t matter anymore during the day. So as soon as you use any one of your three advance reservations, you can book any other attraction with availability. This means two things:
1. “Stacking” is no longer possible with Genie+. You can’t sit at your resort pool all day, booking reservations every 2 hours and having a grand time redeeming all of them in the evening. You will only ever have a maximum of three reservations in your “stack.”
2. LLMP benefits rope-droppers and people who can get and use reservations quickly—because then you’ll unlock even more reservations throughout the day.
Your return time window is always going to be 1 hour. You can arrive up to 5 minutes early to your return time and get beeped right through, or you can also arrive up to 1 hour late to your return time and still get beeped through, without any intervention from the cast members. As we mentioned above, though, LLMP benefits those who use return times quickly, so showing up an hour late to anything throws a wrench in that strategy.
RETURN-TIME AVAILABILITY WITH THE NEW LIGHTNING LANE SYSTEM
LLMP IS STILL A RELATIVELY NEW SYSTEM, and as such, the availability of return times at various attractions throughout the day is certainly going to shift as Disney and guests get more comfortable with the new rules, technology, and processes. But a few things are clear:
1. Lots of return times are getting booked in advance. That means it’s impossible for return-time availability during the day to be as good as it was with Genie+. No one booked return times in advance under that system. Now they do.
2. The attractions most impacted by advance selections sucking up all availability are the most-popular Tier 1 attractions (Frozen Ever After, Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, Slinky Dog Dash, and Tiana’s Bayou Adventure) and time-saving Tier 2 attractions.
3. But Disney is trying to compensate for poor same-day availability by adding more return-time drops throughout the day at several attractions. These are times during the day when suddenly many more return times become available for various sets of attractions. If you pay close attention to the app to catch these drops, learn when they typically happen for attractions you’re interested in, or use a service like Standby Skipper that can book return times on your behalf, this will gain you a lot of ground compared to people who just book and then forget to check back.
