On our arrival day (Mar 29) we plan on hitting Magic Kingdom from about 5:30p to 11:00p, including Extended Evening hours. The only other time we’ll be at Magic Kingdom is on a rope-drop morning of a park-hop day (Apr 4), with the afternoon and Extended Evening at Epcot (and a long resort break in between!).
My question is, do you think it’s worth getting Genie+ for our arrival day? Would we be able to stack up some Genie+ reservations for the evening, or would Genie keep trying to serve us earlier reservation times that we wouldn’t be able to use?
I was leaning against Genie+ for our MK/EP day because the conventional wisdom is that Epcot isn’t the best park to use Genie+ at, but maybe I should rethink?
Thanks for any advice!
ETA: I’m thinking I want to use Genie+ on one of our MK days, not both, and trying to decide which of those days makes more sense.
It depends. How rich are you and how much do you hate queuing?
I used it for my arrival day in October basically just for Soarin’. LLs are virtually walk-ons and the standby line was 40 mins. I then used it for SSE which saved me maybe 10 mins.
You do have to monitor things during the day to get the time slot you want, which is vaguely annoying.
I try to avoid lines longer than 20 minutes when I can. I don’t mind waiting 30–45 minutes for my top 2 rides in a park.
I can afford Genie+ but I’m quite frugal and don’t want to “waste” it.
I’m starting to settle on a strategy of seeing what we can get done at MK with Extended Evening on our arrival day, and no Genie+. Then if we still have a lot of unchecked boxes on our MK/EP day, we can buy Genie+.
I like the idea of getting G+ on your arrival day. I bet you could knock everything out that you want to do. Then on your second day, you could relax and just do whatever appeals to you, and then like you said hop to Epcot where it’s not very useful.
You can use it to stack by making your first booking at 7, then 11, 1, 3 and 5. Then by the time you get there you could potentially have 4-5 rides ready to go. I think that could be worth it. Just would need to be careful you book times after your arrival window.
But I don’t get a choice of times, right? Or is it easy to get evening times if I just wait till they start popping up? (And then, I need to consider that I’ll be in flight for several hours of that day and thus unable to book stuff.)
I would 100% get it on your arrival day. You should have plenty of time to stack them up so you can use them all relatively quickly when you get there. The times do go fairly quickly for the biggest attractions, JC especially, so you shouldn’t have to stall too much on booking your reservations.
For your MK/EP day I would maybe purchase ILL for Remy/FEA if those are priorities, but otherwise just use a good touring plan to make the best of it.
That’s actually probably best anyway since you’re going for those later times. You’d only be about 90 minutes behind the normal schedule. If you planned on being in the park at 3 for example I’d book JC before your flight, then another ate return time pass at 12:30 and then at 2:30 I’d aim for one with a return time near 3 so you can immediately get another one after tapping in and then just roll along the rest of the day.
I think this plan would work exactly. On my late arrival day, this is how it worked out. Booked a 7;30 Jungle Cruise at 7:00 and then it was not until after 12:30 when the times got to the evening.
Definitely see which rides are not open during extended hours to prioritize those.
As you noted, the trick is going to be the ability to find rides you want with availability in the time slot you want. This will severely limit the ability to stack them.
The next question becomes how much time it will actually save you considering you will also be using Extended Evening Hours.
On the other hand, MK is the one park that G+ makes the most sense on, if you are going to use it.
It sounds like you’ll potentially be able to book/stack up to 4 by the time you arrive to MK at 5:30, and then MAYBE get another 2 while there (if they aren’t all gone by then).
I don’t have the answers, just things to consider.
I personally don’t like the idea of it for a half day. I barely think it might be worth it for a full day. And I also would leverage use of it for later in the trip when you’re “over it” regarding waiting. When you first arrive and you’re excited and not yet tired your tolerance for waiting will probably be higher than later. Or at least that’s the case for my group.
Also from what we’ve been hearing those extended evening hours are pretty nice for extremely short waits. Why not consider having a little longer time at MK on that rope drop morning and returning to EP a little later than you might be. It doesn’t sound like you’d need a lot of time there to be able to enjoy a lot of attractions for the evening with the extended hours.
It’s not. Our group is three adults. (Not that there’s anything wrong with a grown-up liking MK the best! It’s just that we don’t feel the need to do a lot of meet-n-greets or the kiddie rides, so the equivalent of a full day is probably enough for us.)
Right, and that’s totally fine! It just says to me that if it’s not a priority park, why would you spend extra anyway? In other words, the thing I’m least interested is not the thing I’m willing to spend MORE on.
That’s a good point…on the flip side, though, spending more on MK might allow them to spend less time at MK and more time at the other parks, so in a way, it might make sense.
(Of course…as is always my caveat…I wish NO ONE would buy G+…ever!)