SotMK?
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This is correct. Your eligibility always goes off your most recently booked LL and is reset after tapping in to that LL of 2 hours later (limited to 2 hours after park opening), whichever is first.
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What @Jeff_AZ said regarding ll booking.
SotMK is Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom which was an interactive card game that’s no longer operational.
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So are any of these so busy that you have to do a virtual queue and/or HAVE to sign up for Genie+? I am going the week before Thanksgiving week, so it should be at least a little lower crowd. When we went in 2016 the week before Thanksgiving, it was fairly low crowds. We wouldn’t have gone back if it was Thanksgiving or Christmas weeks.
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The only ones that you HAVE to enter the virtual queue for (as of today - might change by November) are Tron and Guardians of the Galaxy. There is no standby line so if you don’t get in the VQ or don’t buy an ILL, you will not be able to ride.
You don’t HAVE to buy G+. Many people do not and still have a perfectly good time. It just depends on your tolerance for waiting in lines. Becky has this article which discusses the time you can save in lines: How Much Time Can I Save with Genie+ at WDW? | TouringPlans.com Blog
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When watching videos, make sure they’re fairly recent (6 mos or less old). G+ LL can be modified now, which was a big change. Some of the older videos won’t have that feature explained. They can still be helpful, but you want the most current info possible.
If you won’t be getting G+, I think your best bet is to plan on RD for the headliners, and consider getting an Individual Lightning Lane for the most popular ride in each park. It is a separate purchase from G+ and can be a better use of funds depending on your plan and which park you’re in.
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GotG and Tron are mandatory VQ and they most likely go in seconds. ILL ($) sells out pretty fast but give you a little more leeway than VQ, but at a cost.
As for whether you need G+, really depends on how much you are trying to accomplish. Generally speaking, crowds are higher than pre-covid all around and wait times can be longer. “low seasons” have become less low and CL predictions more unreliable or in certain ways misleading. It’s worth checking how your dates looked like in 2022 from TP data in terms of actual wait times to get an idea.
Personally, I’ve used G+ every time and found it helpful on both low and high crowd days. The main reason for using is that we’ve had just 2-3 park days and wanted to squeeze the most out of them. On high days I could stack the selections and get at least 3-5 G+ choices during the day for long queues. On low crowd days the benefit is obviously smaller but at MK I was able to get instant LL’s throughout the days to rides with shorter queues. This meant I could walk up to certain rides, see it has a 20 minute wait, get G+LL instantly and walk on (of course not possible on highticket rides). Utilizing it this way obviously varies by park and whether it’s worth it is up to you, but just saying this to point out that there are different ways of getting use out of G+.
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Excellent point!
…this in a nutshell is why we’re doing our first 100% Universal Orlando Vacation this year. …and there’s plenty more!
“Everything is more expensive, no more magical express, no more airline luggage checkin at the resort, $6 package charge for deliveries at resorts, no transferring refrigerated items between resorts, every restaurant has a more limited and more expensive menu, mobile ordering is available at most qs restaurants, no parking lot trams at Epcot or HS, Skyliner is fully operational between CBR, Pop/AoA, and HS and Epcot, no more SotMK… I definitely am probably missing quite a few things, but you didn’t ask a specific question so”
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Let me get this straight about Genie+ - if you get it, it’s $15-$22 per person per day and you only get 2 LL passes? Is that right? Or do you get unlimited?
You get one LL per ride that is included with G+. But you can get as many unique rides as you nab with the rules outlined in the G+ thread.
The limit of 2 is for a la carte/individual Lightning Lanes (ILL or sometimes abbreviated to $LL). These aren’t included in G+ but are available for an additional cost to anyone (don’t have to first purchase G+ to then buy up to 2 ILLs per day).
The current WDW ILLs are:
Tron
Seven Dwarves
Cosmic Rewind
Rise of the Resistance
Flight of Passage
Pretty much everything else that had a FPP on the old system is included in the G+
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Awesome. So it seems, you could theoretically go from ride to ride without having to wait in standby lines if the crowd was low, right?
For example, you could ride Haunted Mansion with LL pass, then get one to Thunder Mountain and ride it with a LL pass, then get on Pirates with a LL pass, etc. until you have ridden each ride with a regular LL once in the day, right?
I know it wouldn’t really work like that, but we are talking in theory.
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Yes that is how it would work if you had immediate LL times at your disposal as you worked through your plan. If you get super savvy with the ins & outs there are ways to actually move through the LLs of one each, but that takes some diving into the advanced G+ threads and that made my head spin a bit. So I just stuck to using BG1 & put the rest of the tricks aside.
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I was relatively successful doing this when “stacking” on my trip. We would do mostly standby in the morning but I would book for the afternoon. I did buy ILL for SDMT and ROTR, but here is an example of two of my evenings.
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So my last question (for now) is how many LL passes can you get have at once?
As long as you’re within the confines of the rules (based on when you booked your most recent LL) as many as you stack. It just depends on how far into the future the LL times are going & how early you get started.
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Yea, practically speaking, if it’s a quiet day, lower tier rides have LL’s available on shorter notice whereas on busier days they are booked further. More popular rides with longer waits are booked further out.
There are various strategies for booking LL’s. If you arrive a bit later, you can stack them by booking the first one at 7am, second one 2hrs after the park opens, third one 2hrs after and so on which is what @NervousRex posted above. If you enter early, the strategy would be either stacking for the afternoon or using the first LL early to book another one and so on. To make any strategy work, it’s good to have an idea of different wait times and what times LL’s typically sell out to prioritize the order. You can find this info on some of the guides and for example on thrill data.
the thread here on G+ is quite daunting and the system has been revised so I recommend looking up an up to date guide on one of the popular WDW sites and blogs. After reading through a couple of them you get a better idea of how it works.
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If it was true you could only manage 2-3 LL per day with G+ I doubt anyone here would pay for that. If you dive into the G+ Strategy and learn ride priorities and strategies for each park, you can easily do more.
I just came here to say… also last visited in 2019 (August), doing three weeks this August and equal parts excited and scared!
Our last trip was supposed to be with grandparents, but their flight to join us was cancelled by hurricane Dorian so this is our post-COVID attempt to give them WDW with the grandkids.
Not planning to do Genie+, might splash out on ILL for ROTR. TP worked SO well last time, I’m hoping it will be reliable again. looks like CLs are going to generally be in the 6-8 region.
Going to lurk on this thread for any other summer 2024 tips!
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