Disney Genie announcement

[quandrea]

I remember our child free days. Original prints. Signed prints. Thankfully wdcc ended right before kids. Lol but yes we deff spent waaaay more then. Now it has to be something really special or rare for us to jump on it.

Disney doesn’t want us multiple year after year trippers. We don’t buy T-shirt’s every trip. We don’t come home with bags of stuff we will never use again. I have said that for 10 plus years now. We have zero effect on the Disney outcomes whether we go or not. If every simple multi trip family stopped going in theentire world it would have zero effect at the end of the day. Zero. Disney needs the magic in the now not after the trip ends.

Makes me sad because I love it. Been going since 1981 and I’m pretty sure I’ve come to the end of the road.

 

[jimim]

Yes, @Turksmom, this is exactly the reason I don't like it. It seems to be a gamble. What if I buy it and never use it because the rides I want are never available at the times I want? Then I'm just out $15/person? Or will they refund the price?

Oh they best be. If I buy it and I can’t get anything before noon I’ll wait in line at first relations till my dinner adr for that 15 dollars. They can buy me a glass of wine at dinner!

 

[Cj2017]

I never work overtime and just went in today for 6 hours to cover the cost of the Genie plus ($240)

My boss said, "Are you coming in next Saturday?" I said "Depends on how much more this trip gets"

That being said its not great we are paying for it but I cant stress about what I cant change

 

[buzz1fan]

Have they listed anywhere what hotels are onsite.
Hilton bonnet creek was onsite for the 1/2 hour park opening, do you think it will be for the LL?

sounds like 7am for genie + will be just I’m fine there

 

[jimim]

Makes me sad because I love it. Been going since 1981 and I’m pretty sure I’ve come to the end of the road.

The past year has been hard for everyone and it has weighted heavily on me. I have had very little want or desire to travel back. Now I have even less. This might be my final nail. I just don’t have the energy in me anymore for planning it and just running that gauntlet. This past week and back in June just sitting at the beach with a house on the ocean and fishing everyday has really put things into perspective. This past year spending waaaaay more time on the water has put it even more into perspective.

I don’t really know.

 

[bookgirl2632]

This may be a dumb question. I am the planner for my group. My mother doesn’t have an MDE account because I always do the planning for us. Can I purchase the Genie+ or the individual ones for all of us? Or does each person have to?

 

[Twitterpaited]

My concern is if guests staying off property will have much chance of getting to ride RotR and Remy’s. I am considering getting a 1 night throw-away campsite at Fort Wilderness just to be able to book those. Just give Disney more money…

 

[Jrb1979]

My concern is if guests staying off property will have much chance of getting to ride RotR and Remy’s. I am considering getting a 1 night throw-away campsite at Fort Wilderness just to be able to book those. Just give Disney more money…

If you pay you will probably have a chance. I don't think many resort guests will buy them up.

 

[Gordo Gato]

What if I buy it and never use it because the rides I want are never available at the times I want? Then I'm just out $15/person? Or will they refund the price?

This is my assumption: there will be limited numbers of genie+ passes that can be booked. So people may very well not get a genie+ pass or just get 1. It’s like FPs - the supply was finite.

 

[cdurham1]

Like I said previously, why would you buy an IAS before actually seeing the wait times. IMO the only ones thst will sell out will be ROTR, remy and maybe FOP. I know I will not buy an IAS ahead of time except for maybe the 3 I mentioned. I would be highly annoyed if I bought one for SDD and I get there and it’s a manageable wait time. I don’t see these going as fast as some think they will. I could be wrong.

Interesting. I am buying the IAS as soon as I can on the app. The only question for me is do I book the first LL first or do I book the 2 IAS first.

 

[Jrb1979]

This is my assumption: there will be limited numbers of genie+ passes that can be booked. So people may very well not get a genie+ pass or just get 1. It’s like FPs - the supply was finite.

I'm thinking that you most likely get at least 3 passes for sure.

 

[cdurham1]

If you think RotR boarding group is hard to get now, wait till IAS starts and they are holding back spots for that. This makes me think of high frequency trading on Wall Street. Am I going to need to pay someone to set up my computer closer to the Disney servers to get a boarding group?!

 

[Gordo Gato]

Interesting. I am buying the IAS as soon as I can on the app. The only question for me is do I book the first LL first or do I book the 2 IAS first.

My first thought was buy both IAS first but what if I want ROTR but not SDD? Will I be able to pick a time for Remy after 2pm so I can hop to Epcot? Or are the times assigned? Or are you limited to the park where you have reservations?

 

[HopperFan]

.

Have they listed anywhere what hotels are onsite.
Hilton bonnet creek was onsite for the 1/2 hour park opening, do you think it will be for the LL?

sounds like 7am for genie + will be just I’m fine there

In watching the one video with VP of digital I believe he said the "Disney World Resorts" hotels can book at 7 am, not "onsite". This might be one of those perks that they truly reserve for just Disney owned hotels since they are have fewer and fewer perks.

HBC isn't even onsite, but Disney did offer the few BC hotels some perks. We'll just have to wait until they formally announce and honestly they might not have decided, I think they will adjust the whole plan over the next several months.

 

[Raychell]

I also wonder if they will hold spots on ROTR for Star Wars Hotel guests when it opens. And also, what happens when the free Genie tells a guest to cross the park to catch a 20 minute Splash Mtn wait and by the time they get there it is 50?

 

[twodogs]

Yes, @Turksmom, this is exactly the reason I don't like it. It seems to be a gamble. What if I buy it and never use it because the rides I want are never available at the times I want? Then I'm just out $15/person? Or will they refund the price?

Again, if you ever used Max Pass at DLR (which seems very similar though not identical in many ways to G+), you know that you could arrive mid day, and even the most top tier rides like RSR would still have some times, albeit later in the evening, available for a FP. At some point in the day, the top tier rides would run out of FPs, but not really because you could refresh the app and they would pop up from time to time due to cancellations (or drops, though those were not confirmed to happen). Even if the only time shown when you went to book a FP was hours later, you could refresh and almost always get a time that was within 30 minutes, even for GOTG and other very popular rides.

None of us know what the availability of LL is going to be, but Disney will not sell many G+ at all after the first few days of the roll out if times are “never available”. So I don’t see this happening (and MP at DLR is a great example of how it will likely work). Also at DLR, you could see the current available FP return time for every ride BEFORE you purchased Max Pass for the day. So you could decide, with real time information, if it was “worth it” to you, on the day, BEFORE you purchased it.

 

[JakeAZ]

I also wonder if they will hold spots on ROTR for Star Wars Hotel guests when it opens.

No doubt they will. For the price people are paying, it’s literally the least they can do.

And also, what happens when the free Genie tells a guest to cross the park to catch a 20 minute Splash Mtn wait and by the time they get there it is 50?

You don’t have to pick the ride across the park and it’s just giving you a return time for the non standby line. It’s not promising you a set wait time.

 

[kc51570]

I also wonder if they will hold spots on ROTR for Star Wars Hotel guests when it opens. And also, what happens when the free Genie tells a guest to cross the park to catch a 20 minute Splash Mtn wait and by the time they get there it is 50?

One of my thoughts as well. People were already looking at the wait times in MDE. This scenario happened to us in July. Everest was listed as 5min in MDE. By the time we crossed over from the Starbucks it was an hour.

 

[kc51570]

No doubt they will. For the price people are paying, it’s literally the least they can do.



You don’t have to pick the ride across the park and it’s just giving you a return time for the non standby line. It’s not promising you a set wait time.

One of the things they are advertising for the free version of Genie is alerting you of shorter than average wait times for rides you may be interested in.

 

[MediumSizedMermaid]

So aside from the fact that it's an upcharge I really don't like that G+ is only one ride at a time. Which is not how Maxpass worked. 1.5 hours after your selection you could book something else, regardless of the time window (For paper FPs it was 2 hours).

Worst case scenario: If all the popular G+ rides are booked through to the afternoon, then you're not getting any use of it before then. Or if you book something less popular with a sooner slot the popular ones may all be gone by the time you go back. So either you're using it for the less popular rides that don't have a wait anyway or you're getting 1-2 of the better rides out of it. Either way that seriously hurts the value.

And I get that they don't want to have everything booked up right away but without any stacking or guarantee before the day of I can get at least one ride I want I'm more reluctant to purchase at all.