Quick report. My daughter and I went to DL for the first time last week. I had a work trip in California and so that's why we went. I'll maybe post a trip report, but I very much like DL over WDW. I had given up on WDW years ago, but I would definitely go back to DL.
We used
Genie+ and found it super easy to work with. The crowds were low though because school just started up again so I think that made the use of it easier.
Pros
1. enter the park of choice and immediately see what has the best LL. So easy to plan your ride day off of it.
2. If a ride breaks down not only do you get your next LL but you also get access to tons of rides as a secondary LL. We had daily ride breakdowns and this feature made it more than reasonable. Especially for something like Indiana Jones where you'd enter the park and LL would be 4 hours out, whereas if you got Big Thunder at 30 minutes out and then BT went down, you could then use the exchange LL for Indiana Jones right away while then rebooking maybe something like Space Mountain 30 minutes out. Super cool.
3. Crowds matter. The lower the crowd the more you get out of LL Genie +
4. Dining use was also fairly easy to use and it helped us get last minute reservations to Blue Bayou. Ordering from the phone for pick up was also awesome.
5. Park hopping after 11 was also flexible. We could use LL back adn forth California Adventure and
DisneyLand
6. Beyond LL it shows wait times. The wait times were mostly accurate.
Cons
1. the app eats up tons of battery power especially if you have an older phone like I do. I had to buy one of those disposable./exchangeable chargers to keep my phone powered up most of the day. Disney does not have outlets at the parks because the outlets lack surge protection.
2. Running an android. The app crashed daily. Not a huge deal because it was easy to restart, but at least a couple times a day needed to restart it.
3. You really should have your tickets/bar code ready in LL before you enter the line, otherwise you just wait for people who don't know how to use the app.
4. When crowds got big (weekend) it was much harder to get more rides in through the day, but the app still was very valuable. It allowed you to decided to bounce to another park.
5. You can't use LL on paid for rides. I didn't like the idea of paying extra for Rise or the Resistance, but I did it anyway because it was clear the line would take forever and I wanted to really try it. Since it was just 2 of us, I paid the $50 because you could not otherwise get a LL use it was either pay extra or wait 2 hours in line. BTW - Rise of Resistance was not worth it. It was a fun ride, but not worth paying extra for in my opinion. you also often had to pay for Mickey's runaway train. We just did standby for that one since the cue is fun to walk through. I definitely would not pay extra for the Mickey ride even though it's a good ride.
Because DL is so tightly together, Genie + works really well. I don't know it'd work as well at WDW because you can't bounce around parks as easily. But overall super pleased with the use of Genie + and would definitely do it again
Thanks for confirming the same-park modification info.
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