Walt Disney World

New Genie+ and Lightning Lane Options Come to the RideMax App for Walt Disney World

I’m excited to announce that the Disney World version of the RideMax app for both iOS and Android now supports the use of Genie+ and individual Lightning Lane reservations when you create your RideMax plans. This post dives into the details.

The Disneyland version hasn’t shipped yet, but we expect to have it available soon (Disneyland plans assume standby-only for now).

I’ll cover the highlights of the app update here, but if you’re already a RideMax subscriber (or you just want to play with the user interface as a guest user), you can download the updates from the following links:

iOS version for iPhone and iPad

Android version for direct download from the RideMax website

Above is the new “Create RideMax Plan” screen, which gives a high-level overview of the options used to create this plan. Note the new “Genie+ Lightning Lane” section at the bottom.

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Merry Christmas from RideMax!

With 2020 almost in the books, what a better way to close out the year than to share a few holiday photos from the Magic Kingdom!

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Disney Increases Capacity at Several Attractions – RideMax Estimates Updated!

A quick update today to let you know that just in time for the busy week between Christmas and New Years, Disney has increased capacity at several attractions, and we’ve adjusted our RideMax estimates accordingly.

An example of the sort of thing I’m talking about here is Frozen Ever After at Epcot, where Disney has placed plastic dividers between rows of seats on the boat vehicles, allowing guests to be seated in every row, rather than every-other row as before.

Attractions affected in RideMax by this most recent round of changes include:

Frozen Ever After
Expedition Everest
Slinky Dog Dash
Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster
Millennium Falcon – Smuggler’s Run
Tower of Terror

Not all of the above were affected by capacity increases, but adjustments for some attractions may have had a sort of ripple effect on others.

The bottom line is that if you’ve created RideMax plans for Disney’s Animal Kingdom, Epcot, or Disney’s Hollywood Studios, I’d strongly encourage you to create new plans instead!

Walt Disney World Wait Times Are Increasing!

Just a quick note here to summarize what’s probably obvious to anyone keeping an eye on the crowds at Walt Disney World lately, and that is that the waits are increasing as Disney allows more guests into the park. (For those of you who are RideMax members, we’ve updated our RideMax planning estimates accordingly.)

We’ve been keeping a pretty close watch on wait times since the parks reopened, and I think this graph of the Avatar Flight of Passage wait times represents what we’ve seen lately:

As you can see, average waits here were pretty low for the last half of August (with a predictable bump on the weekends) averaging around just ten minutes on weekdays and between 30 and 40 minutes on weekends.

Fast-forward to this past week, and you can see that on weekdays the average now hovers around the 40 minute-mark, with the highs on weekends up closer to the hour range (with something of a blip on September 13th, when the average wait was 80 minutes).

I know I already covered this in my Five Tips for a Fall Disney World Visit post, but hope this serves to emphasize the point: come prepared for longer waits!

Visiting Walt Disney World in Fall 2020? Here are FIVE TIPS for Getting the Most from Your Trip

Thinking of visiting Walt Disney World this year over fall break? The parks are in such a unique state right now that I thought I’d rundown my top five tips for a 2020 visit.

Let’s dig in!

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