The 1pm park hopping restriction makes using genie + in the other park extremely difficult, unless you’re able to stay super late. We have a 6 year old, and she can hang pretty well, but we can’t rope drop and then stay at DCA until 10pm. We’re locals…. We were there Wednesday and Thursday this week and did a one night stay at the GCH. We took advantage of EE on Wednesday, and got a lot done. We left after lunch and enjoyed the hotel, then came back for the parade, which was at 5:15 due to filming, and went over to DCA and had a nice dinner at Wine Country. Then called it a night.
Thursday we did Genie + because it was busy, and my parents are in town and they really wanted to ride Soarin. We started at
Disneyland, so to get on Soarin we had to do Genie. They were down to one theater so it was a mess, and the standby line was 95 minutes, even though the line was short, due to the LL standby ratio. One elderly gentleman was so upset… he couldn’t understand why he and his party were near the front, but had been in line for an hour. He was pretty angry and raised his voice at the cast members, and I can’t say I really blamed him.
I booked a LL for Soarin at 1pm and then as soon as we scanned booked another one for Guardians at 3. But that was it, because by 3pm my youngest was exhausted and we didn’t feel like hanging around until after 5 to book another genie plus because there wasn’t single ride with a return time within 2 hours. So we used Genie plus on a whopping 2 rides at DCA.
I absolutely detest the 1pm rule.