When Disneyland Resort finally reopened earlier this year it did so without FastPass, its system allowing guests to skip lines on some key attractions. The replacement for FastPass, Disney Genie+, debuted at Walt Disney World earlier this year to much fanfare, but fans on the west coast have had to wait as Genie was given no release date at Disneyland. Now it has one, and it's sooner than you probably think as it will be hitting in just two days on December 8.
The Disney Genie app will begin its integration with the existing Disneyland app on December 8, 2021, and with that will come the option for guests to purchase Disney Genie+. It will give guests the ability to skip the line on some popular attractions for an additional fee. The app will also allow guests to buy Individual Lightning Lanes, that will allow for queue skipping on the resort's top rides.
Disney Genie+ will cost $20 per guest and it will allow those guests to select the next available return times for rides like Space Mountain and the Haunted Mansion. Three big attractions will not be included in Genie+. At Disneyland park, Rise of the Resistance, and at Disney California Adventure, Radiator Springs Racers and WEB-Slingers: A Spider-Man Adventure, will have a separate fee to jump the queue that will run between $7 and $20 per person depending on the ride, the season, and ride popularity.
While it was expected that Disney Genie would be hitting Disneyland Resort sooner rather than later, I think we were all expecting more than 48 hours notice of when it would launch. Having said that, Disneyland's previous FastPass system included MaxPass, which was an app based system for an added fee, much like Genie+, and so it's possible that Disneyland didn't need to do much to make Genie+ work inside the parks.
Based on anecdotal evidence at Walt Disney World, Genie+ will probably be quite popular when it launches at Disneyland. While guests are certainly less than thrilled about paying more for their Disney trip, and about paying for a service that was previously free, it seems a lot of people are paying for it in Orlando.
Along with Genie+ Disneyland will also be getting the other elements of Disney Genie on December 8 that are entirely free. Disney Genie allows guests to tell the system what sort of experiences they want and have the app suggest what they should do, where they can eat, as well as suggest the best times to visit certain attractions when lines are at their shortest.
On the one hand, rolling this out now, before a lot of guests who will be visiting for the holidays make their trip, is good business sense. There will be a lot of potential customers who will take advantage of the system. At the same time, one wonders if that many people using Genie+ at once will have a greater potential to break the system, considering it will likely have at least some growing pains in the first few weeks and months.
It will also means that guests that hadn't previously made too many specific plans about how they were going to experience their vacation may now need to do so.
