Is Disney Genie+ Worth It? Here's My Experience

In recent months, my family and I have taken several vacations to Walt Disney World in Florida, visiting several parks including Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and Animal Kingdom.

We're Florida residents with passes, so this hasn't done as much damage to our checking account as it would if we were out-of-staters visiting just for the day. But, we have broken out the credit cards to purchase Genie+ on several of these trips, which is a big added expense.

We wanted to try out Genie+ to see how the new paid service worked after Disney discontinued FastPass in 2021. But, the big question is, did it end up being worth it? Here's what I think.

This is what we got for Genie+

Genie+ is Disney's service that allows you to sign up for Lightning Lanes for most, but not all, rides. When you sign up for a Lightning Lane, you can jump into a different line than the standard queue. It's a much shorter line and, for some rides, you can get on within a few minutes in the Lightning Lane rather than waiting 30 minutes or more in the standard line.

Genie+ doesn't allow access to every ride, as there are certain rides in each park where you would have to pay individually per ride for a Lightning Lane entry. But, since I have small children who do not go on most of the rides that require you to pay for individual Lightning Lanes, it gave me access to pretty much every ride I wanted to go on, including Ratatouille, SmallWorld, Winnie the Pooh, Figment, the Na'vi River Journey, and more.

We were able to make our first Genie+ lightning lane reservation at 7 a.m., two hours before the park opened. We used that reservation to claim a spot at Ratatouille at 2 p.m. While this tied up our Lightning Lane since we could initially only reserve one, we were able to make another reservation two hours after park opening at 11 a.m. -- and then to make additional reservations either every two hours after that and/or when we'd used an existing Lightning Lane.

By the time we got to the parks and had our breakfast, we could make our next reservation and walk right onto a ride. And we did that all day at Magic Kingdom one day, and all day at Epcot and Animal Kingdom the next.

With the ability to continually reserve Lightning Lanes, we never had to wait more than about 10 minutes for a ride -- and we enjoyed our day a whole lot more than on previous trips when we'd had to wait 30 minutes or more.

Here's why I think buying Genie+ was worth the money

Genie+ is not cheap. On the day we went, it cost $25 per person so it was $75 for our family of three (my daughter is under 2, so we didn't have to buy a pass for her). That's a lot of money.

However, without Genie+, we would have maybe been able to get on about five or six rides in a full day -- and with it, we were able to get on dozens. It both made the day more fun and more importantly, enabled us to complete all the rides at two parks in one day instead of two. Since buying Genie+ is cheaper than buying another full-day ticket, it may make particularly good sense for people who pay by the day to opt for the service.

Ultimately, if you can swing it, it's worth trying once to see if it's valuable for you. For us, on crowded days, it's almost not worth going without it because the day is miserable when you have to wait in line for 30 minutes or more with a preschooler and a toddler for every single ride.