Genie+: The New vs. The Old

This is the first in a series of posts about Genie+ and Individual Lightning Lane. Having used the new system, I have a lot to say about it – enough so that for those interested you can expect five or six of these to follow along with! Before commenting on the good versus the bad, the price versus the value, or the app issues versus the product issues I need to address the elephant in the room. No, not Dumbo – what I mean is the biggest issues with Genie+: it is not Fastpass+.

The first key difference everyone jumps to between the two is, of course, that Fastpass+ was free and Genie+ isn’t. This fact alone soured many to Genie+ from the second it was announced. I’ll admit, I’m not in that crowd. For several years now all signs pointed to Fastpass+ becoming a paid service. The two biggest indicators were Universal successfully having a paid line skip just down the road which was then combined with what was happening to standby lines – they were glacial. Nothing showed this quite as well as the period during the pandemic (especially when crowd levels were higher in the summer of 2021) when there was no line skipping service. Lines moved not just fast but perpetually. I visited Walt Disney World in early August of 2021 and it was shocking to say the least. At some rides, like the Kilimanjaro Safari, you could barely keep up! Even when a line was long, it was always moving. With Fastpass+ the standby lines never moved. So, between all of that, numerous park goers were predicting Fastpass+ would go paid – yet many of us were still shocked by the price. I’ll talk about it in one of those later posts…but the pricing actually isn’t unreasonable compared to the gate price (you can decide for yourself if the gate price is reasonable) – but it was a massive jump from free. I’ll go out on a limb and say that if Genie+ had premiered at $5 per person per day, folks would complain about the cost much less. Even if it later increased to $15 over the next few years, it would probably have been more palatable. It could also have been included in on-property stays (which feels like such an easy win for Disney) to hide the cost. But the sticker shock is very real with how Genie+ was rolled out. 

The other issue is that Genie+ is an objectively worse product than Fastpass+. Every flaw in Genie+ makes you pause and say, “Was it like this with Fastpass+?” and in almost every case the answer is no. For Fastpass+: 

The list goes on and and on and I’ll highlight more of the issues in my other posts. The point is that FastPass+ was a mature product that had most of the kinks worked out years ago. Personally, I also think the stress factor of the two products shouldn’t be overlooked. FastPass+ was stressful to schedule. I recall waking up at the crack of dawn 30 or 60 days from my vacation to schedule – or rather to watch my wife schedule – our FastPasses and often fail to find the rides we wanted. But, by the time we went on vacation, that stress was gone. Genie+ makes that stress part of my vacation, starting at 7 a.m. every morning of the trip and coming around again every two hours after the park opens. A bad FastPass+ booking morning could ruin my day for sure, but I got over it before I was anywhere near Florida. A bad Genie+ morning can ruin my vacation, and that’s just terrible. 

So, Genie+ launched with the one-two-punch of going from free to a high cost and downgrading the product substantially. Either of these on their own would be a poor experience; together they set Genie+ up for failure. The numbers reported make it clear that Genie+ is selling, but I have to wonder how long until word starts to get around. Worse, there is likely a growing number of “done with Disney”-ers because they feel Disney overcharged them for a terrible product. Disney tends to be expensive, but their model has always been that you get a level of product and service to match that higher price point. Charging more for less may create a momentary windfall, but will be hard pressed to maintain long term sales if the brand itself loses its value. 

— Dave