We despise it. We have been to DLR with the 1:00 hopping and even that is too late. We like to start our day at DL and then hop over to CA for lunch. 1:00 is too late for lunch for us. Also, there is nothing more annoying than trying to book lunch reservations at 60 days out and the ones you really want are only available on days you have a reservation for the other park, and before 1:00 p.m. We found the hopping restriction extremely annoying. We were stuck at DL one morning and it was ridiculously crowded (like 60 minutes Small World crowded) and we could look on the app and see all the lines in CA were really short (like 20 minutes Toy Story Mania short) and we couldn't hop to get out of the crowds. We also despise the park reservation system. Every morning we saw children crying with stressed out parents because they had been turned away from the parks as they had tickets and no reservations, or their parents thought you could just show up, buy a ticket, and enter the parks. It was multiple groups every day too. It was heartbreaking. It is not a good start to the day, and almost made us feel guilty for entering the parks after walking past sobbing 4 and 5 years olds. Our October DLR trip was the most stressful Disney trip we have ever had (between no FP, crowds, and virtual queques which were near impossible to get) and we have been to WDW in a hurricane. I currently have a friend who is completely freaking out-- they have a family trip planned with 10 people coming in from different areas, they have their flights booked and a big house rented, they have been promising to take the kids to Disney for years and the kids, who have never been, are extremely excited. They knew nothing about the park reservation system. They thought they could just get online and buy tickets a few weeks in advance. After I told them about the park reservation system, they checked and their planned days are already unavailable. They have no idea what they are going to do-- everything else for their trip is already booked so they can't change their dates.
At WDW, we often stay in the EPCOT area and we like to hop to EPCOT for lunch when there are food booths, which 2:00 p.m. restrictions prevent. There have also been times that I could only get a lunch ADR at a particular place on a day we planned to be in another park, so we hopped for lunch. We also have done the 4 parks in a day a few times, to pick up things we missed or for someone's one more ride preferences. We've also hopped when we found out something in a different park was only available that day at certain times, or it was the last day for something. I feel like we are getting so much less and being charged so much more right now. We weren't pleased during our stressful DLR trip in October, which had replaced our WDW trip scheduled for that same time as I cancelled WDW because of the major price increase ($3000 more for the same dates, same room category than it was in 2019? No thank you). I just cancelled our summer WDW trip this week too. I don't want to pay thousands more for the resort and have to deal with park reservations and park hopping restrictions. I have a friend that just got back, from a family WDW trip with grandparents and he said that they used Genie + and were only able to book 2 or sometimes 3 rides a day for their group with it, they kept getting nothing was available. The trip just isn't worth the price right now-- and we are used to going every year.
