Top 12 Easy Lightening Lane Tips

Lightening Lanes (formerly known as Genie Plus) are a time-saver at Disneyland park. It is aimed to help families utilize the park better during their stay. You can purchase Lightening Lane multi-pass or a Lightening Lane Single Pass. Today we will share some tips to decide if it’s right for you and how to use them well!

Many of us anxiously waited for fastpasses to return to Disneyland theme park after the pandemic, only to be waiting a LONG time. First they launched Genie+ and in 2024 they changed it to Lightening Lanes.

Today I want to give you my best tips to use Lightening Lanes (which I will hereafter refer to as LL) at Disneyland Resort effectively. We use it on our trip, and find it very effective!

What are Lightening Lanes (LL)?

It’s a paid service that gives you a way to access “Lightening Lanes” which essentials allow you to skip ahead in long lines and not wait as long for rides at Disneyland and Disney California Adventure. You can use it one time each day per ride. If you have a park hopper pass, you can skip lines in both parks (if you do not have a park hopper pass, you only skip the line in the park you have chosen).

Disneyland Genie Plus Attractions

Currently there are 19 attractions between the two Disneyland parks that offer it, plus a few more individual lightning lane attractions for an extra fee (I KNOW, it is SUPER CONFUSING — that’s what I’m here for) 🙂

Disneyland Rides that Offer Lightening Lanes

• Autopia
• Big Thunder Mountain Railroad
• Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters
• Indiana Jones
• It’s a Small World
• Matterhorn
• Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run
• Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway
• Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin
• Space Mountain
• Star Tours
• Pirates of the Caribbean (only temporarily at the time of this writing)
• Haunted Mansion (currently a virtual queue, will likely return to LL)
• Splash Mountain Tiana’s Bayou Adventure — will likely be virtual queue and then transition to a lightening lane.

Disneyland Individual Lightening Lane Options:

• Rise of the Resistance $20+

California Adventure Lightening Lane Options

• Goofy’s Sky School
• Grizzly River Run
• Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: BREAKOUT!
• Incredicoaster
• Monsters Inc.
• Soarin’
• Toy Story Midway Mania
• Spiderman Web Slingers

California Adventure Individual Lightening Lane Options:

• Radiator Springs Racers $7-$20

So, at this time those 19 rides are available at the $25+ lightening lane purchase.

Pricing is subject to how busy the park is. Lightening Lanes are $25 if you purchase it with your ticket, however if you purchase it in the park it can go up from $25. I think up to about $35 (pricing is per person).

And those 2 rides allow individual lightening lane purchase.

Remember, everyone in your party must purchase Genie Plus to use it to make ride reservations and everyone must purchase that individual lightening lane in order to use it.

HOWEVER, you don’t have to purchase both.

So if you’re good to wait in the other lines, but you’d like to skip the Rise of the Resistance line — just purchase it for $25 and use just it. So, it’s up to you and your plans for each day.

What is a Lightening Lane and How Does it Work?

It’s what used to be a fast pass line (same line, nothing there has changed much).

When you go into the lightning lane entrance, it allows you skip a portion of the standby line (for most of them you don’t just go to board, you do still have to wait in a line, and I’ll talk more about that later).

When you look in you app, you’ll see a standby time (that’s the regular line) and then for these select rides I previously mentioned, you’ll see a Lightening Lane return time window. That would be the time you’d be allowed to return to the ride and utilize the Lightening Lane.

If you want to see a return time, just click on the ride’s wait time, and then on the LL Lightning Lane logo to see what your return time would be. Yes, it’s a lot of tapping. I know.

The Basic Tenants of Lightening Lane Use (we will discuss all of this more in this article):

• You can only use it once per ride/day.
• You can only hold one at once, unless it’s been 2 hours since your last selection (or you purchase an individual Lightening Lane).

Lightening Lane Strategy: How to Get and Use Them

LL’s is all done through the Disneyland app (I recommend downloading it before your stay). Once you’re in there, it’s on your home page where you will see the option to purchase a Lightening Lane (the app is not particularly intuitive — and the screens change a lot, so this is just an idea of what to look for).

This isn’t the ONLY way to purchase it (you can also try to select a lightening lane within a ride) — but it’s probably the easiest.

There are a LOT of screens to go through during your purchase of Genie Plus (most of which are not helpful). It is not a quick process — and make SURE that you click all the “continue”‘s and “purchase”‘s you need to to make sure you have it (otherwise you have to start over). I also recommend having your credit card of choice already linked to your Disney account.

They will talk about the regular Lightening Lanes and the individual lightening lanes and then finally you will have it purchased. Be sure to go through ALL the screens. {Recent Edit, I think they have simplified it a bit, but there are still QUITE a loot of screens, so make sure you click continue and purchase all the way through otherwise you won’t actually purchase it}.

Once you have it purchased, just pick a lightning lane, and then go through all THOSE screens (there’s 4 when we counted) as you confirm you want to make a reservation in that lightening lane. You’ll do that each and every time you pick a Lightening Lane.

A few times I though I had it — but I think I got distracted and didn’t finish the whole thing, and didn’t have a Lightening Lane, so make sure you do all of it.

Pro Tip: Have I said that there are many screens in both of these processes enough? It’s much longer than I anticipated. Make sure you do the whole thing!

Your lightening lane selections will then be found under “my day” on your home page.

When your return time arrives, tap on the the lightening lane at your selected ride and hit “redeem’ on your lightening lane and it will bring up the bar codes for your party to scan in.

You hold your phone in the slot and it will scan them, just swipe to see the rest of your party.

Once you’ve scanned in you should be able to also pick your next attraction if you’d like (unless it’s been more than 2 hours, and you’ve picked another attraction already).

If this sounds confusing, we’ll get into it more. 🙂

Ok, onto the deeper “tips” beyond just using it….

How to Maximize Lightening Lanes at Disneyland

Don’t Use LL’s with Small Kids

There is absolutely no reason to buy LL’s for kids under 32 inches (and honestly, I’d say to really think about it if they are under 40″). Most of the rides can’t be ridden on for people that small. Also, if you have kids who don’t like big rides, think hard if you’re going to use it with them (or would your money be spent better elsewhere).

Remember the height requirements for main of the main Genie Plus Rides:

• Autopia: 32″
• Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run: 40″
• Matterhorn Bobsleds: 42″
• Big Thunder Mountain: 40″
• Space Mountain: 42″
• Indiana Jones: 46″
• Radiator Springs Racers: 40″
• Incredicoaster 48″

There are a few with no height restrictions, but it wouldn’t make sense to buy it to just avoid 1 or 2 lines one time during the day.

I actually think Disneyland has very generous height restrictions (meaning, your child might not be ready for the big feelings that can come with some of those big rides — even if they’re tall enough — check out my parent’s guide to Disneyland for what is scary on rides):

And, be sure to check out my post about Disneyland height requirements charts. It lists all the rides in both Disneyland and Disney World that have no height requirements.

Rider Swap with Lightening Lanes

Possibly consider using rider swap with Genie Plus for adults/big riders in the party.

I’ve seen some people saying only one parent needs Genie Plus to do the rider swap, but I do not think that is true (and it may vary by how attentive the cast member is). As far as I can tell, Disney says that both people in a rider swap need Genie Plus.

FYI Rider Swap is where adults take turns riding “bigger” rides while one stays with the kids. You can learn more about it in Get Away Today’s post on it.

Should You Purchase Genie Plus With Your Tickets?

Before we get into tickets, I wrote a whole post on if you can buy your Disneyland ticket at the gate (not really) — that shares the CHEAPEST way to get Disneyland tickets!

This is a hard one. Let me give you my thoughts on it:

Benefits of purchasing Genie plus with your tickets:

This make it more a part of your Disneyland budget. If it is something you really want to do and you’re worried about feeling nickle-and-dime’d at the park — consider adding it directly to your tickets, which you can do with Get Away Today. >> Get Your Lightening Lane Tickets Here!

Also, when purchased with your tickets, you are GUARANTEED the current price rather than the surge that may happen if the park is busy.

Pro’s of NOT purchasing Genie Plus with your tickets:

You may want to just feel out crowds when you get there. You’ll find you don’t really NEED the pass until later in the day — so, maybe just see if you feel like you need it, and then just purchase it if you do.

If you have a multi-day ticket and you purchase Genie Plus with it — it will come with ALL the days on your ticket — which may not be a great way to use your money if you only plan to be in the park one morning or something.

BEST PRO TIP: Do NOT get your tickets at the park or from Disneyland. You can save on your tickets with Get Away Today — save your money to get churros! 🙂 And you can also save on your hotel rooms. Seriously, they offer a best price guarantee! Plus use code CURLS10 to save $10 on your hotel/ticket package.

Use Lightening Lanes for the Photo Pass

Photo Pass alone is more than $20/day — so having the benefit of Lightening Lanes WITH that is awesome — if it was something you were going to do anyway. This only comes with a LL Multi Pass (not an individual pass).

As a reminder the photo pass allows you to get as many ride photos and pictures with the Disneyland photographers around the park. You can then download them to your computer or device when you get home. It’s a fun way to get memories with everyone in the photos!

Don’t Use Lightening Lanes In the Mornings

One of the BIG differences between how it works now vs back in the Maxpass days, is that you can only use the lightening lane once. That means if you’re a family like mine who liked to ride Space Mountain 10 times/day — you’ll need to ride it 9 times in the standby line, and then you should use the lightening lane for when it’s the busiest.

For us, we chose to pick our favorite attractions and ride them in the mornings (or things that didn’t have lightening lane, like Fantasy Land attractions).

Most often, we weren’t even considering using Genie plus until 10-11am

Also, some rides I prefer more in the dark (Matterhorn, Big Thunder) — so, if that’s the case — be SURE to save your lightening lane for when you’d want to ride it!

What Are Select Experience Passes and How Do I Use Them?

If you have a lightening lane booked for a ride and it goes down, that turns into a “multiple experience” pass (this is very similar to how it worked with Maxpass, if you’re familiar with that).

You can see it here:

This is a pass that allows you to ride any of the lightening lane attractions (but not the individual lightening lane ones) in your “tier”. And yes, that is where it gets confusing….

Tiers of Lightening Lanes

There seem to be two tiers of genie plus lightening lane rides (perhaps 3, but I never got there).

Top Tier: Space Mountain, Matterhorn, Indiana Jones, Toy Story Mania {I think, tell me if I’m wrong in the comments please}.

That means if you have a pass for Buzz Light year, and it goes down — your multiple experiences pass won’t allow you to then ride Space Mountain — but it will allow you to ride the other rides with a more similar standby line time.

So, if you get a select experiences pass, be sure to see what rides are included in it (you can see it under “what rides can I go on” when you tap on the select experience).

Pro Tip: You do NOT HAVE to use that pass for the same ride you originally booked on — and you CAN still get another lightening lane for that ride. Essentially, you get an extra pass good on a few attractions.

Example: You book Toy Story Mania for 10 am, but it goes down and it reverts to a Select Experience pass. You can then use that pass to get on Guardians of the Galaxy, and book another Toy Story Mania pass for another time during the day. You’ll also be able to book Guardians of the Galaxy another time as well.

Extra Pro Tip: It sometimes takes a while to turn to a select experience pass…. if the ride is down in your return time and it hasn’t changed you could talk to someone at guest services. One of ours never reverted, so we just cancelled.

FYI, the multiple experiences pass is good for those rides at any time, you don’t have to book anything. You just walk up and use it at your leisure. Meaning we booked a Lightening Lane for Incredicoaster and used a select experience to ride it, and then immediately redeemed our Genie Plus Lightening Lane for Incredicoaster. We got to ride it through Lightening Lane twice.

What’s Your Ride or Die?

Before going to the parks, talk about what rides you REALLY want to do.

If the park is busy, there is a good chance you may just get to ride some favorites.

Remember what you want out of this trip? Is it to have fun together as a family or is it to ride every ride? What’s your actual priority? I sometimes forget that. Especially when I’m thinking strategy! Thinking like that does me NO favors!

Return Times Vary

Your return time is when the genie says you can return to ride the ride you are selecting. As of now, they give you a 1 hour return slot — so, like 1-2 pm (and I’ve heard you have a 5 minute grace period on either end of that return time).

So, if it’s 9:05 and you pick Space Mountain, your return time is 9:30-10:30 you just find something else to do until your return time starts. Often you can ride another ride during this time (or get something to eat — I recommend mobile ordering).

If your return time is more than 2 hours from when you got the pass, you can get a new pass 120 minutes after your last selection (even if you haven’t been able to get on your original selection yet).

This means if it’s 7 pm and you pick Space Mountain, and your return time is 10 pm… at 9 pm you can get another lightening lane pass. You could likely get a less-popular attraction (like Buzz Lightyear) at 9 pm and still get to Space Mountain by 10.

You need to keep an eye on which rides are almost “sold out” for the day — and grab those before they do. You can stack less popular rides with those as your day progresses.

Set an alarm on your phone to remind you when you can select a new return time (2 hours later) — you’ll forget and stacking those lightening lanes makes for a GREAT evening, if you remember to do it!

Which means if you’re set on riding something either keep your eye on its return times (especially if you prefer it in the dark) or just get it early in the day so you’re sure to ride it (remember rides close and if you wait there’s always a chance you’ll miss out).

Be Sure To Cancel Your Lightening Lane if Not Using It

So, we’ve reviewed that Lightening Lanes can only be used one time with a Genie Plus Pass. But, you may get a lightening lane and then change your mind (or get tied up doing something else and miss your return window).

Make SURE you cancel it.

Regular lightening lanes (not individual lightening lanes) can be cancelled and still be used later in the day.

However, if you don’t cancel and just don’t redeem it, it still uses your one time on that ride. You will NOT be able to get another lightening lane for that attraction for that day. So, just make sure you cancel if you’re not going to ride.

Individual Lightening Lanes can NOT BE CANCELLED {however, if the ride goes down, they do have some flexibility to refund you}.

Individual Lightning Lanes

Ok, all this time we’ve mostly talked about the general genie plus lightening lanes, but there are a few rides that have an additional cost to use the lightening lanes.

Hello confusing, right?

At the time of the writing of this article they are (and the per person pricing is next to it):

• Rise of the Resistance $20+
• Radiator Springs Racers $7+

And yes, that’s per person per day.

So, two of us went on Rise of the Resistance — we paid $40.

And we skipped the 100 minute line.

For some families it’s worth it, for some it is not.

I will say that Rise of the Resistance with that lightening lane drops you right into the pre-show. You hardly wait at all, which is good for such a high price tag!

You can only pick two of these to do each day, and you can’t ride the same ride more than once per day with the lightening lane (you can always ride via standby though).

However, you can hold individual lightening lanes that overlap your regular lightening lane purchases (as shown in the photo above).

There are other ways to skip the lines at Disneyland << check out my post on it!

Lightening Lane Doesn’t Save Time Sometimes

We got Lightening Lane on our last day, in which we had to leave by 5 pm (we were riding to get tips for this article — normally this likely wouldn’t be smart). We used it at Indiana Jones that had a 10 minute wait.

We waited longer to redeem our passes and people who did standby just walked right in.

Also, some lines don’t save you much time at all (as they drop you into the regular line pretty early on). Indiana Jones was probably the worst one for this (in my opinion). Monster’s Inc. and Soarin weren’t very great either. Just FYI.

Beyond Rise of the Resistance, almost all of these lines still have you waiting some amount of time tor ride. I’d guess it’s around 5 minutes + 1/4 of the regular line wait time (depending on the ride).

I have definitely waited 30 minutes+ for Space Mountain.

Genie+ PLUS Hopping

Ok, this is where I think the Genie is the most helpful. BUT, keep in mind you’re paying $50 to hop, plus the $25 to Genie… so this can add to the price of your Disneyland budget.

When you hope you get access to all 19 Lightening Lanes vs just the few in each park (especially California Adventure which has much less than Disneyland).

Let’s say you’re starting your day in Disneyland — and plan to hope to CA Adventure at 11 am (that’s the time you can hop at the editing of this article) and are getting a Lightening lane in the new park for your hopping.

It will not give you a lightening lane until 11am (because it knows you’re in Disneyland, and stuck there til’ 11).

This all being said — I loved Lightening Lane-ing it through both parks. It really made it SO simple to ride our favorite rides quickly (since I was there with my adult son most of our favorites are Lightening Lane rides).

Be Mindful of the Differences Vs the MaxPass/FastPass:

Here are the main difference between the old Maxpass and Lightening Lane:

1. Lightening lanes can only be used once per attraction.
2. It does not include ALL of the lightening lanes (the 3 most popular rides aren’t included in Genie plus).
3. There is no free option, you must pay to play the Genie Plus.

Disney LAND Vs Disney WORLD Lightening Lanes

However, in Disney World it works very differently. I’m not going to discuss it here, but just be aware the systems are not the same.

What our Lightening Lane Strategy Looked Like:

We rode our favorite rides all morning while standby lines were short (keep in mind a LOT of the early birds, especially in Disneyland, head to Rise of the Resistance, leaving much of the park available for great ride times).

We also rode rides that don’t have lightening lanes and we love (including Pirates of the Caribbean & Fantasyland rides).

Then as we started to see ride wait times rise we started to be more strategic about when we wanted to use our Lightening lanes.

In general we would pick a lightening lane and then pick another one right after we scanned into that ride.

Then we’d head to the next one, and pick a new lightening lane as soon as we scan into THAT ride.

Also, because we had park hoppers, it allows you to do a lot more throughout the parks.

Remember: If your return time is more than 2 hours away, set an alarm so you can get a new one once that time has past!

Is the Free Genie Worth Anything?

While we’re here, let’s talk about the Genie in general.

We’ve talked about Genie PLUS, but there is a regular genie that can give you tips during the day.

Useless.

To be fair I didn’t plug in a lot about us, but she kept telling me to go to the Tiki Room or Snow White. I don’t know why. I think this would be more helpful if you were completely unaware of the park or what you should do next.

If you honestly have NO idea about what you or your family would enjoy at Disneyland, it might be helpful. But if you have any clue at all, I’d probably ignore it — or perhaps glance at it now and then if you’re wondering what to do next.

Pure Speculation: They’re trying to send you to attractions that have a low wait and many of them have a low wait because they’re not great. That is all. 🙂

So, those are my best genie plus tips for you.

Here’s 4 things to remember about Lightening Lanes:

1. Genie Plus can ONLY be used once a day for each ride.
2. Genie Plus is best when used with a hopper pass (you can access more lightening lanes with 2 parks available)
3. Watch return times during the day if you have a ride you’d like to be sure and get.
4. After you start using it, always grab another lightening lane as soon as you can (either you scan into a ride or your 2 hours are up) and have an idea of what one you want to grab next.

And yes, I do mean that one person in our party scans in the lightening lanes and I have up another one. as soon as we’re scanned in I complete that Lightening Lane to make sure we’re book on the next one as we wait in line for the original one.

And, of course — book your Disneyland vacation with Get Away Today. They’re my favorites. I’ve used them since 1998 and they just “get” Disney travel for families. Also, I am SHOCKED time and time again at how low their prices are compared to prices on the hotel’s websites. Oh, and they also have a best price guarantee. Remember to use code CURLS10 to save $10 on your hotel/ticket package (you can mention it on the phone too if you call)