Ride Stacking Strategy to Ride the Most Attractions at Disney World
Ride Stacking Strategy to Ride the Most Attractions at Disney World
One of the tactics you can use while visiting the parks is ride stacking. Ride stacking strategy can help you ride the most attractions possible in a day.
Walt Disney World changed virtually everything about how you experience Disney parks when they launched Disney Genie. The new service that comes free when you download My Disney Experience sends you around your park of choice with suggestions and notifications that are meant to make your experience go smoothly.
Genie will give you a lot to do, but you won’t necessarily be doing Disney your way. For that, you will likely need Genie+. The paid Genie+ service is the one that gives you Lightning Lane access to most of the popular rides. Since Lightning Lanes replaced Fastpass, guests have had to learn a whole new system and try to find the strategies that work best.
One of the tactics you can use while visiting the parks is ride stacking. The right ride stacking strategy can help ensure that you ride the most rides possible in a day.
Related: How to Have a Disney Themed Day at Home
How Does Lightning Lane Work?
Lightning Lanes are the new Fastpass queues. There are two different kinds of Lightning Lane. Individual Lightning Lanes get purchased independently of Genie+. These are a la carte experiences for Disney park attractions that have been set aside from Genie+ and are not included in that upgrade.
If you want to skip the standby wait time for attractions like Rise of the Resistance, Avatar: Flight of Passage, or Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, you need to buy these attractions at an individual price tag. That price will vary by date, but it is in the ballpark of the whole Genie+ upgrade for only one attraction. Also, like Genie+, ILLs must be purchased on a per-person basis. That means the bigger your group, the more expensive that ride will be for whoever is footing the bill.
While ILLs cannot be canceled once you purchase them, Lightning Lane attractions included with Genie+ can be. That ability to cancel plays a role in ride stacking strategy, since you may need to cancel a Lightning Lane in order to free up your app to make another selection.
When you select a ride for Lightning Lane, two things happen:
- You get a window for your ride experience. Genie+ will give you a time frame of one hour to arrive at the attraction you have saved a Lightning Lane pass for. This can be at any time during park hours, but you must select the very next time available. This stipulation also plays into ride stacking strategy.
- You will effectively be locked out of making new Lightning Lane selections for the next two hours. There are only two ways around the two-hour barrier. One is to enter the attraction Lightning Lane queue within your return time window. The other is to cancel the selection and make a new one instead.
That’s basically the setup. You can’t make advance selections as you could with Fastpass+. However, you are able to make your very first Lightning Lane selection as early as 7:00 in the morning on the day you will be visiting the park. To get the most value from your day in the park, making your first Lightning Lane selection at 7:00 is a good place for your ride stacking strategy to start.
Lightning Lane Strategy
Make your first selection at 7:00 in the morning. Set your alarm and stop everything. You can even do this before getting on your plane. select the most popular attraction first since those are the ones that are going to fill up fastest. You may notice later windows for returns on those attractions. That’s a good sign that you made a good choice. If you arrive at park opening, there is less need for Lightnin Lane access right away.
You want your standby waits to supplement your Lightning Lane entries so you don’t just rely on Lightning Lane. Get a couple of good rides in without Lightning Lane assistance in the first part of your day. After the first two hours, you can make another selection. Pick an attraction you can enter right away so you can instantly make another attraction as soon as you arrive in the Lightning Lane queue.
Three things to keep in mind to get the most rides possible in your ride stacking strategy.
- when you select a time that is nearer to you you can make another selection faster by triggering Genie+ to reset after entering the Lightning Lane.
- You can overlap times that are farther out as long as using both passes is logistically feasible.
- Check the return times regularly for the best available selections. If you find a better option than the one you’ve made, cancel it and take a better time.
Another thing to always keep in mind is where you are and what attractions are closest to you. The best way to ride the most attractions is to hit everything in your local area before moving on. This is also the best strategy for conserving energy on a long day in the park. Especially if you have several park days planned in a row.
