Another day of app issues at 7am. 10/16

[DLRExpert]

yawn

 

[tseitel]

Stupid. Dumb. Genie. Can’t make selections

 

[DLRExpert]

Back up at 711

 

[MyDogTink]

Yup. By the time I was able to book my first experience, it’s for 12:20. They charge immediately for the purchase of Genie+, though—no delays with that.

 

[gharter]

Had that twice last week. One day was down almost 2 hours.

 

[Minnie1222]

Have the parks been busy? Or is this problem the new normal? We've never had this issue until our last trip 3 weeks ago. I think too many people bought Genie+ at that time. Even on a party day at MK, the G+ lane for Peter Pan extended all the way to Pinocchio eatery.

 

[Len418]

Have the parks been busy? Or is this problem the new normal? We've never had this issue until our last trip 3 weeks ago. I think too many people bought Genie+ at that time. Even on a party day at MK, the G+ lane for Peter Pan extended all the way to Pinocchio eatery.

By quality App standards Genie+ has never been what anyone would call a good, reliable app. But over the last week and a half there have been reports on here of it not working at 7 on at least 4, maybe 5, mornings.

 

[mickeyluv'r]

That's terrible! You have my sympathies. We have experinced short glitches and even short ones are very frustrating.

 

[francie57]

We had trouble two days when we were there from the 4-8. One day it was back up by 7:30 but the other day was 2.5 hours! Amazing how when it finally worked the times were later in the day. Does that mean it is working for some people since you could see the times changing but couldn’t book anything. Once it worked at 9:30 it also pushed your next booking time to 11:30 so we lost out there also! Completely lost any advantage staying on site. They are certainly quick to charge you right away for the Genie+ though!

 

[dizneedoll]

Thank goodness. I was worried when it seemed to work for two days in a row. Can’t have that kind of functionality.

p.s. This is called sarcasm, in case you couldn’t tell.

 

[adear11]

We were there from Oct 7 - Oct 13 with 5 park days. 4 of the 5 days I was up at 7:00 and the site had issues. Of the four days with issues, 3 of them were "resolved" within about 10 minutes of 7:00 but it did cause me to miss VQs for Guardians one day and Tron the next. One of the days, Oct 8, it was down for over 2 hours.

It amazes me that the Disney IT managers/higher ups would rather suffer repeated outages and the ill will that they cause, rather than paying their developers and sysops positions appropriately so that their systems can be fixed properly.

 

[lynzi2004]

We were there on October 6 and had issues off and on all day. I spoke to one of the blue tents and they admitted there was a known problem, but they weren’t having any luck fixing it either. I emailed Disney the next day and they refunded me the cost of my Genie for the day. It took about a week to get a response. So if it’s not working correctly, don’t hesitate to ask for a refund!

 

[PaladinButters]

We were there from Oct 7 - Oct 13 with 5 park days. 4 of the 5 days I was up at 7:00 and the site had issues. Of the four days with issues, 3 of them were "resolved" within about 10 minutes of 7:00 but it did cause me to miss VQs for Guardians one day and Tron the next. One of the days, Oct 8, it was down for over 2 hours.

It amazes me that the Disney IT managers/higher ups would rather suffer repeated outages and the ill will that they cause, rather than paying their developers and sysops positions appropriately so that their systems can be fixed properly.

Oddly I'm not seeing any kind of general "don't bother with Genie it doesn't even work" messaging anywhere. This hasn't affected enough people to bother to fix yet.

 

[adear11]

Oddly I'm not seeing any kind of general "don't bother with Genie it doesn't even work" messaging anywhere. This hasn't affected enough people to bother to fix yet.

I wasn't saying that Genie doesn't work or that it should be avoided. My experience has been that once you get past the initial hit of people trying to book at 7am, it more or less works as advertised. My point was that there seems to be consistent problems with handling the load at 7am (see my previous experience of being unable to book at 7am on 4 of 5 park days on my trip last week), and you can easily find references of this particular issue going back for quite some time. So, one can easily surmise that Disney IT fixing their 7am scaling issues doesn't seem to be a priority for them.

Edited to fix a typo

 

[mickeyluv'r]

Oddly I'm not seeing any kind of general "don't bother with Genie it doesn't even work" messaging anywhere. This hasn't affected enough people to bother to fix yet.

Maybe not on this forum, but many WDW fans elsewhere strongly dislike G+. I've read many posts about going to WDW without buying G+, and many from folks who refuse to visit WDW until something changes.

 

[DisneyFive]

Are guests still able to go to guest services later in the day and be refunded? The thing that sucks about this, is that after the initial outage G+ is still very useful. I would still want it throughout the rest of the day, but those initial minutes to hours are some of the most precious. How do they compensate you for 30 minutes - 2 hours of the prime G+ selection time?

 

[pix13dust]

Maybe not on this forum, but many WDW fans elsewhere strongly dislike G+. I've read many posts about going to WDW without buying G+, and many from folks who refuse to visit WDW until something changes.

Agree! There were 8 of us on the trip. Genie+ and ILL added $300-$350/day to our trip. Then having Genie+ glitch so often during our trip was so stressful. 7 out of 8 of us decided Disney is just not worth it until some big changes are made.

 

[Len418]

Oddly I'm not seeing any kind of general "don't bother with Genie it doesn't even work" messaging anywhere. This hasn't affected enough people to bother to fix yet.

My experience is the opposite in that I see no one saying that Genie+ is a good system, or an improvement over Fastpass+. What some do say is that Genie+ is a necessary evil, this is how to use it, etc. My understanding is that it is going to undergo some major changes next year, such as being able to select rides ahead of time, because people are so unhappy with it.

"This hasn't affected enough people to bother to fix it yet." That would be a very appropriate slogan for the current Disney product. And it may be why their stock is less than 50% of what it was just 4 years ago.

 

[lynzi2004]

Are guests still able to go to guest services later in the day and be refunded? The thing that sucks about this, is that after the initial outage G+ is still very useful. I would still want it throughout the rest of the day, but those initial minutes to hours are some of the most precious. How do they compensate you for 30 minutes - 2 hours of the prime G+ selection time?

This is the situation I experienced. When I went to blue tent guest services, they were willing to refund me ONLY if I cancelled my 2 currently booked lightening lanes, if I used it at all I was going to be out of luck. One of the rides was Slinky which had been having problems off and on all day and was posting a 150 min wait. We were only there for a day so despite my frustrations, I wasn’t willing to cancel but was also aggravated that I had essentially spent $23/person to skip one line albeit a long one. Instead, I kept and used Genie for both Slinky and ToT, then emailed the following day with my complaints that it had been glitchy all day. I was able to book a Tron VQ at 7am but was locked out until 7:30 when I got Slinky for that evening. After that it glitched on/off until about 1pm when I was able to get ToT. By glitching, I mean it was telling me I needed to repurchase it, wouldn’t tell me when I could book again, freezing, etc. We visit 2-3x/year and I am very good with Genie typically, so the fact that I was only able to secure 2 rides by 4pm tells you how bad it was. I also feel as though at least some blue tents were giving out extra passes bc LL lanes were abnormally long in HS that evening. A couple rides had downtime that also likely affected things but it was worse than normal. Anyway, once I emailed them they had no problem refunding me. So don’t take the first “no” you get if experienced unusual problems!

 

[Flash_Sloth]

I was at WDW last week. I had no problems getting the 7am VQ for Tron and GotG. I didn't buy G+. On my DHS day Wed. 10/11, I had trouble buying $ILL for RotR at 7am, but was able to buy it a few minutes later. It was very annoying that the time it first showed me was a perfect time right after our lunch ADR, but moments later when I checked-out, it was a couple of hours later, and really threw a kink into my afternoon plans. I had no problem buying $ILL for Tron the 2 days I did that.

Unfortunately, it seems that we need to keep our expectations low for Disney IT.