A Flash of Lightning Lane

There has been a lot of buzz and complaining around Disney’s removal of the Fast Pass system in lieu of a paid service. I wasn’t surprised by the grumblings. The Fast Pass system was by no means perfect, but it did have a fair amount of upside. I almost feel silly stating that the system’s biggest advantage was a respite from the lines rolled into the ticket price. We all know that.

All good things, I suppose, must come to an end.

Adam and I had agreed long before even stepping onto the plane to Florida that the $15 a day per person base price was too rich for our blood, especially seeing that we were staying eleven days. We also had more of the family with us, bringing the headcount up to nine. I’ll let you do the math. I just did and can’t bring myself to type the numbers.

Before the pandemic, we had gone at the end of October with the crowds being light and the ride times manageable even without the FastPass component. This last trip being just a week later, we figured that we’d be in a similar situation, pandemic or not.

You know what happens when you assume. With some of the park experiences still shuttered for the pandemic, the ride times did not reflect the low numbers we anticipated. Making some parks more difficult to get in everything.

Fast forward to the last day of our trip. Adam and I were now a group of two as the rest of the fam flew back home. And at 7 AM, we purchased Lightning Lanes and bought ride times for Rise of the Resistance.

As you can guess, we started the day in Hollywood Studios, but we also park hopped over to Magic Kingdom in the afternoon. In total, waiting in lines and using Lightning Lane, we got on ten (almost eleven) rides and an Enchanted Tiki Room performance.

We were staying on property, so we did get an extra half hour to play with. However, we chose to hop to the Magic Kingdom in a day with Very Merriest hours, which meant we had a shortened amount of time to enjoy the park. Hence the almost eleven rides. If we had been willing to get ourselves caught up in the mass Exodus mess, we could have used a Lightening Lane on Big Thunder and kept rolling. Getting caught up in that mess is a once-a-trip thing, and we had done that already.

Overall, I didn’t think Lightning Lane was a complete waste of money like others have moaned about online. Maybe my expectations bar was set a bit lower than others. It did serve its purpose for the day- get us on Tower of Terror and Ride of the Resistance.

Although having seen how Tower was operating, I should have just stood in the quasi-intimidating line. They were not filling the queue in the basement area, pushing the wait outside. Oh well, I know now.

Some might attribute the increased wait times to invented inflation. I won’t say that I was keeping track of each ride all day, but when I did notice, I saw some ride inflation going on. Slinky Dog Dash didn’t have as long a wait as posted on our last day. One of our Haunted Mansion rides had a much shorter wait than posted. Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway was also giving overblown ride times.

Rise of the Resistance wasn’t accurate, but that was not in our favor. We thought that 90 minutes for a newer ride wasn’t bad, but that ballooned into nearly a two-hour wait. The Jingle Cruise was just about accurate the two times we got on.

There probably is some deliberate manipulation of wait times, but that’s not just Disney. That’s any amusement park.

No, my biggest gripe with the service wasn’t the potentially falsified busiest to get me to purchase the service. Nor was it the price tag, although that wasn’t a great idea. Yes, yes, I know that every other park does it, and when you think about the per-day price tag, this isn’t that bad. As Anita made Maria see in West Side Story, being the only girl in a white dress is advantageous, not a disadvantage. But I guess that’s just me.

Disney marketing this tool as a reclamation of spontaneity is the point that got my goat.

Setting an alarm to be sure to be up before seven on vacation, glued to your phone refreshing the screen is not spontaneous. If any, few rides had return times within a half-hour window of when we were ready for another Lightning Lane. Repeating the search and refresh process at regular intervals throughout the day makes your day more about scheduling than about enjoying what you are doing.

Sure, getting up on a day six months before vacation to make selections doesn’t quite fit the bill of spontaneous. But it’s closer than this Lightning Lane business. I mean, come on, the worst part of that is that you get a twinge of vacationitis before heading to work or going grocery shopping.

If you’re going to ask that we spend more money at your parks, you could at least be a little more genuine about it.

Would I recommend this to someone else headed to the park? I am not sure. I don’t even know if I would purchase it again myself. Hardly a ringing endorsement, but there it is. Till next time, Nerds.