Just when you thought you had the Disney tickets nailed and there couldn’t possibly be any more options or costs, you come across Disney Lightning Lane Multi Pass and Single Pass options!
Lightning Lane Multi Pass is an optional, additional daily charge that, in effect, upgrades your ticket on the days that you choose, to enable you to skip the queue (or line as it’s known) for an initial 3 rides in the park that you are visiting.
A Lightning Lane Single Pass gives you one queue-free access to a single, chosen ride in a single park.
Lightning Lane Single and Multi Pass give you the ability to significantly reduce the amount of time spent queuing for rides and attractions in the parks – at a cost! On the majority of rides and attractions you can book a time slot to take the ride, and then you enter through a different (Lightning Lane) entrance at the ride to skip the line.
Once you have ridden a Lightning Lane Multi Pass ride, you can then book your next ride through the My Disney Experience app. So, you start off with booking 3 rides (or experiences) for a particular park, and then you add others, enabling you to ride 7, 8 or 9 attractions on a single day’s Lightning Lane Multi Pass.
Annoyingly (but good for Disney’s pockets), not all of a park’s rides can be selected on a Lightning Lane Multi Pass. You choose one ride from a Tier 2 group of rides and then two more from a Tier 3 group of rides.
The Tier 1 rides – generally the two biggest, most popular rides in each of the parks – aren’t available on the Multi Pass. These are the rides that you can purchase a Lightning Lane Single Pass for!
You can, of course, ride or visit any attraction by simply queuing up at the Standby entrance. You don’t have to pay any more than you paid for your Disney entrance ticket.
A quick summary of the Lightning Lane Multi Pass and Single Pass process:
For a more detailed and independent explanation of the Lightning Lane Multi Pass and Single Pass options, take a look at this blog post from Undercover Tourist.
In our opinion, Lightning Lane Multi Pass is, regrettably, worth it for SOME of your Disney days. You can significantly reduce queuing across a number of rides in most of the Disney parks. But it’s not perfect.
And sometimes Lightning Lane Multi Pass time slots for some of the rides can run out! There are only a set number of Lightning Lane Multi Pass slots for each ride and attraction each day and when they’re gone, they’re gone, and you’re left with the good old Standby entrance.
There will be many people who baulk at shelling out additional costs (albeit not on all of the days) on top of the already significant ticket outlay.
And bear in mind that, once purchased, Lightning Lane passes cannot be refunded.
If you do have any issues with these services (or any other Disney-related activity) whilst you’re in the parks, just go to Guest Services or look out for Disney cast members located under or around blue umbrellas. They will always do what they can to help.
There is also a free Genie service that comes with the My Disney Experience app to help you get the most out of your day in a Walt Disney World park. Genie can help put together an itinerary for you, make ride and activity recommendations, literally guide you to an attraction, help you make dining reservations and order food.
We mention Lightning Lane Single and Multi Passes here (in the second step of planning, before you leave for Walt Disney World) to provide you with all of the data to help you put together an itinerary for your vacation that includes a rough plan of what rides, activities and attractions that you want to do for each day that you’re in a park.
And whilst you can’t (officially) purchase and schedule rides through Lightning Lane passes until 3 or 7 days before your first park visit and you’re in the US, you can at least begin to think about which days you think that investing in Lightning Lane passes may be appropriate.
Whilst we may not be considered normal (!), we do schedule in advance into our itinerary spreadsheet 3 or 4 rides that we would like to do for each of our park visit days.
We may not always achieve these rides, but it enables us to have a plan for each day, rather than wandering around the park deciding which attraction to ride on the fly.
This helps us plan for the days that we feel investing in Lightning Lane passes will help us get the most out of our time in the parks.