Lightning Lane Tips & Strategy

Disney’s new Lightning Lane Multi Passes and Lightning Lane Single Passes have the potential to save you significant time in line, but are they worth the money? And how can you maximize their potential, so you get every last bit of value for your dollar? Our comprehensive Lightning Lane strategy guide will help you get more rides with less waiting!

There’s so much to cover about Lighting Lane Multi Pass and Lightning Lane Single Pass that we split the information onto two pages:

  • This page has tips and strategy to help you maximize the value you get from purchasing Lightning Lane Multi Pass and/or Lightning Lane Single Pass.
  • If you haven’t already, we suggest you also read our main Disney Genie & Lightning Lane page, which covers the basic rules and procedures for all these technologies.

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Are Lightning Lanes Multi Pass, Single Pass or Premier Pass Worth the Money?

This is a highly subjective question, and it greatly depends on how busy the parks are, how much you value your time, and your personal vacation style.

How Busy Are The Parks?

If you’re visiting during a very low-crowd period, like midweek in September, you may want to hold off on buying any kind of line-skipping upgrade until you see what the lines look like. Even on a slow day, there will be some lines, but you may feel like they’re totally reasonable, even for the big draws like Rise of the Resistance.

During mid-crowd periods like early and late summer, the lines will be starting to get more daunting, but with careful planning and getting to the park early, you can avoid many of them. That said, Lightning Lane Multi Pass will still save you time, and that’s time you could be spending trying on every kind of limited-edition Mickey ears.

During high-crowd periods, like spring break or Christmas, the lines get long early and stay long. Paying for Lightning Lane Multi Pass and Lightning Lane Single Pass reservations for your must-do rides should add significant value. Keep in mind that on a high-crowd day, you may only be able to get 3 or 4 Lightning Lane Multi Pass reservations before the most popular reservations are sold out. However, 3 or 4 well-chosen Lightning Lane reservations can absolutely save you multiple hours of waiting.

What’s Your Time Worth?

Here’s one way to think about it: if you look at what you’re spending to go to Walt Disney World, including transportation, tickets, food, etc., and then how many total minutes you’re spending in the park, most families are spending at least $1/minute (per family, not per person). That’s not true for everyone – locals with annual passes typically spend much less per minute, for example, while people who go VIP all the way might be spending $2 or more per minute. But it’s a nice round figure that’s not too far off, and makes it easy to make a ballpark estimate of what a particular amount of time saved is “worth”.

If you go with the $1/minute figure, then paying to skip rides is often going to be worth it. We’re a family of four, so buying Lightning Lane Multi Pass costs us $64-$92/day. It’s not hard to save 64 minutes of waiting by using Multi Pass, even on slower days, so that seems to pencil out. And while in busy seasons the price goes up, the amount of time you can save goes up as well.

With the Lightning Lane Single Pass, you can do similar math. Four Lightning Lane reservations for Space Mountain cost around $30 (more or less depending on demand). Can you save 30 minutes with those reservations? Yes, on a busy day, but not so much on a low-crowd day. It’s not hard to save 60 minutes or more with a Rise of the Resistance Lightning Lane reservation, even during less busy days, so that’s going to pay off more often.

There are also, of course, intangible factors. If you just hate paying for add-ons in general, then the annoyance of spending additional money after you’ve already spent so much might loom really large. Or skipping line waits may feel great to you – so great that you’d pay even more to get that feeling of living like a VIP. If $1/minute feels wrong to you, substitute your own value, but make it a nice round number so you can calculate it in your head and answer questions like, “How much should I be willing to pay to skip a 1 hour wait?”

What Kind of Vacation Do You Want?

If you prefer to mostly wander and soak in the atmosphere, riding a favorite ride here and there or taking in a show or two, then buying Lightning Lane access might not offer you as much value. If you want to ride as many headliner rides as possible, paying for shorter lines should let you get more rides in with less stress.

Another factor is how much you value being able to sleep in longer. Everyone knows that getting to the parks early will save you a lot of waiting, but less than 25% of the guests actually arrive at opening. Clearly, lots of people feel like “sleeping in” is a key part of vacationing, and if you’re one of those people, you should embrace it and vacation the way you want. If you want to be able to roll into the parks at 11:00 am and still get a lot done, then Lightning Lane Multi Pass and Lightning Lane Single Pass are going to help quite a bit! 

The Bottom Line

We don’t really recommend buying Lightning Lane Multi Pass for every theme park day, unless you’re going at a peak time of year. Most of the time, it’s worth picking a few days and just paying for it on those days. It’s easy to just buy Lightning Lane Multi Pass for the days where you know you’re going to try to hit a lot of popular rides. You can also wait until you get to the park and see how long the waits are and how much time you can save. Don’t wait too long — every hour that goes by reduces the value you can get from Lightning Lane Multi Pass, but the price stays the same. The one situation where you really need to buy in advance is if you really want to get a Lightning Lane reservation for a super-popular Multi Pass ride or a ride that just opened within the last year.

Whether to buy a Lightning Lane Single Pass reservation is probably a simpler decision. All of the rides that have Single Pass are hugely popular and generate massive lines, so if it’s super important to you to ride those rides, getting Single Pass will almost certainly save you time. Even for the rides that have virtual queues, buying a Single Pass in advance means you don’t have to try to get a Virtual Queue slot during the 30 seconds the queue is open. The Lightning Lane Single Passes for the newest, hottest rides can sell out several days in advance, so if you want to get on one of those, definitely be ready to book on the first day you’re eligible. The least popular Single Pass rides will still be available on the morning you arrive in the park (and might stay available for much of the day). 

Lightning Lane Premier Pass is really not a good value for most people. For the kind of money the Premier Pass costs, you can get a whole extra park day, plus Lightning Lane Multi Pass and all the Single Passes for both days, and have money left over. Even at high season, two full park days with the regular Lightning Lane passes should get you on everything you care about. But you will need to plan at least a little, and you’ll need to be on your phone regularly, snagging new passes, looking for better times for your existing passes, and so forth. So if you have the money and want to spend it to make your vacation smoother and more relaxing, Premier Pass may be a great choice. It’s a luxury, and almost by definition luxuries aren’t really about “value.”

In the end, it’s a personal decision. If you like to splurge on your Disney trip and go first-class all the way, then definitely get Lightning Lane Multi Pass and all the Lightning Lane Single Pass reservations for rides you want to experience. Or go big and get Lightning Lane Premier Pass! You only live once! On the other hand, if you like to “beat the system,” you can definitely get on all of these rides with fairly reasonable waits by going early or late in the day, going to the parks at low season, or both. It’s your call.

Basic Strategy Tips

These are all simple techniques that will help optimize your usage of Lightning Lane Multi Pass and Lightning Lane Single Pass, with minimal extra work. You do not need a degree in Advanced Lightning-ology to use these. (Lightning Lane Premier Pass doesn’t really require any strategy – you just buy it and go to the park. You don’t have to reserve anything or book anything once you have the Premier Pass.)

Please note: These strategies are not all documented, and were worked out via extensive testing. Disney can change them without warning, though we have no reason to think they will. If you notice a discrepancy between what we say about the way Lightning Lane Multi Pass and Single Pass work and your experience in the parks, please let us know.

Before Your Trip

During Your Trip

Advanced Strategy Tips

These are strategies aimed at the hard-core optimizer who wants to get on as many headline rides as possible with the smallest wait times. If these strategies make your eyes glaze over, don’t worry about them. You don’t need them to have a great day in the parks. Keep in mind that not everyone in your group has to understand them, just the person managing your Lightning Lanes.

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Refreshing To Get Earlier Times

Sometimes you can get an earlier reservation than usual if your luck holds up. People can now cancel their Lightning Lane Multi Pass reservations, which they couldn’t with FastPass. Those cancelled reservations get put back into the booking pool, and can be booked by you! This section is about maximizing your ability to get those earlier reservations.

Using Grace Periods

As mentioned in our overall guide to the rules of Lightning Lane Multi Pass, there is some flexibility in when you arrive to your Lightning Lane reservation. Our tests indicate that you can tap in up to 5 minutes before the beginning of your arrival window or 15 minutes after the end of your arrival window. For example, if your window is 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm you could tap in as early as 1:55 or as late as 3:15. The strategies that took advantage of the late grace period have all been removed by Disney (as we expected), but there are still some points worth noting:

Getting More Tier One Rides

The toughest “gets” for Lightning Lane Multi Pass are often your second-choice and third-choice tier one rides. For example, at Epcot, there are three super-popular Tier 1 rides: Test Track, Remy and Frozen Ever After, and you can only pre-book one of them. If you’re clever and the parks aren’t completely packed, you can often get a Lightning Lane for one or even both of the other two, by following this strategy.

The key is that as soon as you’ve badged into your first Lightning Lane of the day, you open up a reservation slot, and at that point tiers are no longer relevant – any ride in the park that still has Lightning Lane reservations available can be booked. So you want to book one of your Tier 2 rides as early in the day as possible, so you’ll be able to get a Lightning Lane for another Tier 1 ride while there are still some left. If you want to try for three Tier 1’s (which is not easy), you can do it, but you might be missing out on valuable Lightning Lanes you could be using sooner. It’s a trade-off.

Here’s an example: 

Top Picks For Lightning Lane Multi Pass & Single Pass

Listed below are our suggestions for attractions that will give you the biggest bang for the buck, so to speak, from Lightning Lane Multi Pass and/or Lightning Lane Single Pass. They’re in priority order, mostly based on the maximum line waits we typically see and how quickly they tend to hit their maximum wait. 

Abbreviations guide

Our Top Selections

Lightning Lane rides marked PB are ones where Lightning Lane times are likely to get claimed very quickly. The next available return time could be hours in the future fairly early, possibly even before the park opens. A few of them could be completely sold out, maybe even before park opening on a busy day. If it’s super important to you to get a Lightning Lane reservation for one of them early in the day, it’s a good idea to get it pre-booked on the first day you’re eligible to book. In a few cases we’ve marked multiple Tier 1 rides as PB, and obviously you can’t pre-book them all. The recommendation is to book the one highest in the list, and then try to get the others on the same day after tapping into your first ride of the day.

For Hollywood Studios in particular, both Rise of the Resistance and Slinky Dog Dash can sell out very quickly. If those are important to you, get them booked ASAP.

All the rides in the list generate longer lines fairly quickly, and are good choices to save you a bunch of waiting time. Once you’re in the park and ready for a new Lightning Lane Multi Pass reservation, choosing the next ride on the list is a good rule of thumb. We’ve organized these into priority order based on how long their lines get and how quickly they get long, so start at the top and work your way down. If you don’t want to ride one, skip it and get the next one.

If a ride has a Single Rider queue, that’s a good alternative to Lightning Lane if you want to save your Multi Pass reservations for other rides. Everyone in your party will be called individually to fill in a single space, so you won’t be riding together, but you’ll be on and off the ride at almost the same time. On busy days, the single rider line can still have a significant wait, but almost always much less so than the main standby line.

All the other rides that aren’t on our list could be perfectly fine choices for Lightning Lane Multi Pass or Single Pass, but depending on how busy the parks are, you can probably ride many of them standby while you’re waiting for your next Lightning Lane reservation to come up. If you knock off all your high-priority reservations early in the day, well, the rest of the day is gravy! At that point just grab any Lightning Lane reservation that looks like it would save you some time.