App Review: My Disney Experience, Disney Genie and Disney Genie+
Was the extra $45 a day for Genie+ rides worth it? Eh. Let’s discuss.
Disney World has a new app that you use in the parks, and I really want to love it. It’s cute. It’s clever. It’s fun to swipe through and it’s pretty robust. Graphically, it invokes Robin Williams’ Genie from the cult classic Aladdin and in so doing, it telegraphs that it will fulfill your wishes for food, drink, bathroom access, ride access and times and princess parade locations with the swipe of a button or a push notification. But when I arrived in November, in Orlando, for the combo 50th Anniversary celebration and the Halloween Boo Fest, the user experience left me with mixed feelings.
On the one hand, using the free Disney Genie and the $15-per-person Disney Genie+ add-on to the My Disney Experience app was amazing for letting me see the time anticipated to spend in line at any ride at any one of the four parks that my family visited. For some rides, like the Safari at Animal Kingdom and Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run at Hollywood Studios, my family of four hopped on with no issues and no wait. The free Genie app saved us time and headaches because we skipped some rides — and some waits — completely. But some problems got introduced with the paid version of the app that allowed us to upgrade our ride experience and — in theory — select our ride time.
Ultimately, it wasn’t the cost that was a pain in the ass. It was the amount of time I spent on my phone during my vacation, paired with poor app execution and the tension introduced into my trip due to a so-called time-saving bit of tech.
How it Works
You download My Disney Experience to your phone, you link your magic bands to the app so you can access the park without using your cell phone. You only really use your phone when you need to use Disney Genie or Genie+ or when you get on the monorail or when you rise at 7 a.m. and log on to snag the best ride times. If you know where you want to eat, you use the app to purchase your lunch and dinner immediately, and get a time to come by and pick it up. Then, you can see ride times and map your walking plan out. But if you are hard core, you drop in your credit card number again and buy Genie+ first so you have the best options for ride times so you can fully plan your day in the park.
But here’s the rub. You can’t always map out what you want and time it so you can walk there efficiently with little children, through swaths of other people with little children and in the case of Hollywood Studios, through hundreds of adults who are lingering in the middle of every sidewalk in a galaxy far, far away. The app gives you times based upon whatever the algorithm says — and that kind of sucks if you buy two rides next to each other but the timed entries are seven hours apart. AND, TLDR: that whole skip-the-line situation doesn’t work when there are a thousand other people who also paid to line skip and who also got the same time that you did.
Nowhere was this more a PITA than it was when going to Epcot Center, which (unbeknownest to me at the time) was also celebrating the uber popular International Food and Wine Festival. Epcot is also where rides for Soarin’, Frozen and Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure are located, so I decided to go on ahead and opt to use Disney Genie+ to get a space for Soarin’ and then used regular Genie to get myself a place in the “virtual line” for Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure. (If you stay at a resort hotel– for me that was the Contemporary–then you have access to get into the virtual line at 7 a.m.)
All the Facebook Disney mom groups said to wake at 6:30 a.m. and have two phones and an iPad ready to log in to the Disney app, buy Genie+ for Soarin and then procure my place in line for Remy. You have to be ready to reload and reload fast because thousands of other parents are doing the exact same thing in order to gain access to Disney Genie+ and its 40 or so Lightning Lane-enabled attractions at Disney World.
Well, we got into boarding group 27 or so for Remy’s Ratatouille ride, an estimated three hour wait from park open. So we were encouraged to enjoy the park and roll up at 1 p.m. to get on the ride. But at 1 p.m., the app buzzed and push-notified me they were still boarding group #15, so my boarding group was being pushed to 4 p.m. Oh, and by the way, Epcot allows a new group of visitors to reserve a spot in the virtual line for spots open after noon or so. So this text also served as a reminder that I was not guaranteed a spot on the ride.
Good thing I didn’t tell my kids about the ride. For the next few hours, we enjoyed Epcot (the aquarium is great!) and especially enjoyed the international food fest. Soarin was Covid-safe (Disney was not playing about requiring masks for all indoor attractions) and leg-dangling amazing. But we wound up waiting in line for a little over an hour to ride. This was only possible for us as a wait because my littlest guy fell asleep in his stroller.
As for Remy, we didn’t ride Ratatouille until 8 p.m. And, if not for the disability pass granted that day to one of my sons, we would have stood in line for an hour after getting to that line. Instead, due to his disability, we were able to wait for a shorter time period in the lightning lane (aka fast pass lane.) We passed up folks who said they were in a variety of boarding groups, many of whom decided to leave the park for the night and skip the rides. After all 8 p.m. is pretty late for many littles. Mine were asleep before the fireworks even began.
Are the apps the problem or is something else going on?
The Ratatouille wait issue might not be a pure app problem at all. It might be a process or procedure issue as well. As of November 2021, it also was not included as an option on Genie+, but I mention it here because the average user lumps all Disney things together and does not distinguish between these multiple levels and layers of app usage. Regardless, I was never able to figure out why we got pushed out to ride at the end of the day. But for many families, as we discussed it while waiting in line for various rides, it appeared to be an app issue. Some said their boarding group number changed between 7 a.m. and 11 a.m., as if it had been reset from group 10 to group 47. Others said they could never log on and were booted off the app from the start.
That said, I was also told by cast members that Genie+ was a new add on that launched in October with the anniversary celebrations. And with hundreds of thousands of people in the parks, everything was bound to slow down.
The app was also wonky at times and a little confusing. Not all rides are included in Genie+, so if you want to ride Space Mountain at the Magic Kingdom, you have to pay extra cash per person for that one since (when I rode it) it was not included in the base level Genie plan. Also, if you have two adults in your party and both adults have cell phones, the app(s) got confused about which adult paid for what, which child went with each adult and which account each pass was linked to. At one point Genie told a cast member my five year old was a solo party of one and must ride alone at 1 p.m., and we could all ride at 3 p.m. That person thankfully waved us all on, and told me the app was oddly splitting up a lot of families.
Several times, Genie and Genie+ removed my husband from our party and gave him a separate ride time than was provided for myself and our two children. Another time, upon entry to the Haunted Mansion, the cast member told us we snuck into the park illegally, didn’t have Genie+ and informed us she was going to call security.
This was my eldest son’s birthday trip and it was his actual birthday, so we actually had to ride this ride. Since the app was wonky, I pulled up my own My Disney Experience app to show her, proving I have paid and activated and reserved ticket access to the park, and I showed her my refreshed Genie+ screen. She refused to look at either, instead eventually telling me that “Just this once she would “allow it” and let us ‘get away’ with it, but if [you] try it again” she “would report” us to the Disney police and presumably the Kissimmee police as well.
Fun times ensured later on when I asked for her manager and her manager’s manager because I refused to take the blame for an app that led to a human tersely telling me I flew from Chicago to Orlando to stay at a premium Disney resort only to sneak into the Magic Kingdom two days in a row with a five year old and my 9 year old birthday boy in the middle of Covid-19.
Oddly enough, thanks to extra Peter Pan rides that were magically uploaded to our account by the manager’s manager manager, gift shop tours and ice cream, the boys were none the wiser of the issues that mommy worked out while they flew over London and got back on Haunted Mansion 2x in a row.
It seems something was awry with Disney wifi or the employee version of the Disney app, and that led to a terrible customer service issue. In these conversations I also discovered that their wifi (at the time) was not as good as my personal wifi. (I had brought my Skyroam Solis with me and we used that for all our internet needs, as I presumed the Disney wifi would take a hit given the anniversary celebration and new app roll out.) My instincts were right: the cast member’s apps were not updating, so one person had the right info and another person had the wrong info on my family party and our entry times. They all used tablets as an interface with their employer. But not even the manager could figure out why the app kept separating my family and deleting me, my husband or a kid from our park activities.
A similar issue ensued at Pirates of the Caribbean, also in the Magic Kingdom. Each engagement left me wondering if Disney had enough engineers working the app bugs or if they had adequately tested this on Android or if they needed to run cables and hard wire each attraction to a desktop in order to ensure proper speeds and accurate entry screens.
Who knows why it went awry. Perhaps it was all due to the crowd surge alone. Or perhaps I twice ran into some poorly-trained cast members.
In short, the time I was supposed to have spent not waiting in line? I waited anyway. For each day of this trip, I wound up waiting in line or online with customer service and talking to a senior level manager for at least 1.5 hours a day. We developed the habit of going to the customer kiosk after every ride for a reset because that’s usually when my husband got deleted. At least my husband was able to take the boys to get cookies and ice cream and lunch while I waited for Disney to reboot my app, remove and then re-add my husband to the party, erase and then reprogram our magic bands and then re-add all of our ride options except oops! By now, all the ride options were gone, already purchased by other folks.
Then the next level manager had to be called so we could be walked on the rides or the app could be over-riden so that we could get a pass to get on the ride because the extended wait for customer service meant our original ride time expired. A few times I paid for a ride only to be told — minutes later — that the app could not accommodate my selection, but I could not be reimbursed, per the fine print at the bottom.
Yikes. This would have been a total mess if not for the Disney managers who chose to apologize for the daily app wipeouts and accusation of theft. [They also vowed to make up for the freshly fried, carefully-arranged chicken wing placed on our couch just before check-in on day one.] Those folks proceeded to immediately sprinkle copious buckets of Pixie Dust on the rest of our trip, including going into my app calendar and adding us to the rides we wanted, close to the times we wanted on the days we wanted.
But, in the end, would I recommend the various Disney apps?
It’s kind of an unfair question but I’ll answer it with both yes and no.
First, you absolutely need the basic My Disney Experience and My Disney Genie app to motor around Disney World. Admission, food and fun extras are all tied to it. Those apps do a ton of work managing hundreds of thousands of people in an effort to manage crowd control and wait times during a deadly pandemic. Hiccups are to be expected. I don’t know how folks do any of this if they don’t own a cell phone.
And yes, if you can afford it and your primary objective is to ride every ride, you need Genie+. With this comes the understanding that you will be on arrival deadlines and looking at your phone most of the day, refreshing and checking to see if you got what you wanted, what time it is and where it is located.
For the yes crowd, I suggest taking your time to learn the app(s) before purchasing any rides or at least procure a physical, paper, park map so that you can “buy” your ride time while looking at the walk time between attractions.
But I also say no, or maybe, to Genie+ if you are the type that needs to go with the flow and needs the ability to change your mind. You can’t really change your mind once you spend the $15 per person on the app so you are locked into arrival times. And, if your kids — like mine — enjoy looking at all the scenery and greenery and stopping to sit on the curb to watch the parade, it’s a good idea to hold off on hyper app purchases until you are already in the park and at least get down Main Street.
Note for yesses and nos: If Disney transportation is delayed and you are forced into skipping your earliest selections because you couldn’t get to the park, the app holds you in limbo until you walk to the rides. You still need to scan in so they can tell you no, you can’t ride because you missed your time. Only after that can you select new rides. (This was true in November, but hopefully they fixed that bug by now with an option to cancel a ride.)
Last, given the general bias toward iOS devices, it’s possible that iPhone users had a better user experience than me at the height of this Halloween and 50th anniversary celebration at Disney. But as a loyal Samsung owner, I really hope there is no bias and I was just the victim of a shitton of people using a new app within weeks of its release. I hope Disney works this out sooner than later. After all, courtesy of them, I’ll be back.