Not at all. The fact that you have no control over a return time makes this nothing like FP+. It’s more like a paid electronic version of the original FP system. The angst is that Disney has taken nearly full control of your schedule unless you just want to resign yourself to standby all day. Their marketing for this is truly Orwellian. In one sentence it tells you how the app will keep telling you where to go and the next sentence talks about how you can be more spontaneous. No matter how you look at it - people whom actually liked planning their Disney trips - which is a great number of people on this board - just lost a hell of a lot of control over their day and most likely a great increase in wait times overall (not to mention how bad this is for people who don’t want to wake at 7am and rope drop).
I’m not seeing this in any way taking control of my schedule. We don’t have to take the Genie suggestions, or even look at it at all.
i look at it as a quick place to get information to help answer that question “what should we do next?”, something that everyone at a WDW park faces several times a day.
If it works like it sounds, you can (if you want) look at the app and see wait times and next available LL times for every attraction, with emphasis on ones you’ve identified as your priorities.
In the old paper FP days, if you were interested in a particular ride, you had to go to the attraction itself to see the standby wait time and see the available FP return time. If the standby wait was too long and the FP return time not available, you had to move to a Plan B and repeat the process. This will let you make that decision more quickly with fewer steps.
A lot of the free Genie service looks like a more robust version of Touring Plans. People who have followed those plans religiously (not us) might find this to be even better than that because the plans can be adjusted with real time information about wait times, attractions that are down, etc.
Assuming that Disney doesn’t allocate even a higher percentage of a ride’s capacity to the LL, I don’t see why this system should make standby lines longer than they were with FP+. If anything they might be shorter because fewer people,will be running around with their 3 ”free” FPs. That would all seem to depend on how many guests decide to pay for
Genie+ and ILLA.
For those guests who never used paper FP (and Disney said that was about half of them) this will just be a return to those days with everything standby (except for those attractions that have IALL and a VQ).
I‘m looking forward to seeing how it works in practice.
