Disney Genie service deeply unpopular among fans before it has launched

Oh the marketing power of the word "free."

Nearly all of those 12,000 people will visit the parks in the next year. Nearly all of those people will find reasons why they enjoyed their trip. The few that do not come will not be missed by a company that has been up front about the fact that they'd like to cut back on the number of people in the parks a little bit without sacrificing revenue.

This is so very reminiscent of the CBuzz reaction to any new coaster layout before anyone has ridden it. Sucks.

The hardcore Disney blogosphere has never come to terms with the fact that Disney can only be 2 of the 3 following things: affordable, uncrowded, high quality.

Nor can they come to terms with the fact that Disney is a for profit business.

It seems better to just jack up the price of admission over this, thoughts?

I'm remembering the year Holiday World built Legend (or was it the year they added a transfer track and 2nd train?) and started offering free drinks (included with price)... they just raised the admission by $4. It made it better for everyone.

I have a group of friends who left today for their umpteenth trip, they go all the time. And this is the week Genie rolls out which didn’t make them very happy. But they’re going to go all out with it, because guess what? There’s all kinds of e tickets, old and new, that they intend to not miss.
Which is what everyone else is going to do, by the way. I give it less than a year before it’s totally the norm.

The problem with jacking up the price is that it’s not nearly as elastic. If we hit another major crisis of some sort and people lose jobs, it’s much easier to just welcome them without Genie than to have to keep changing the gate price up and down. Or if the parks get super crowded and everyone is buying individual attractions, they can easily (and have already said they will) change the price dynamically.

The other thought I had is you can segregate AP’s from once-in-a-decade visitors with upcharges. It’s unlikely that AP’s will purchase Genie+ regularly, but for the guests who are first-in-a-long-time, $15 per day per person is a drop in the bucket. This allows you to direct more of your ride capacity at the people who you care more about and who will spend more.

And that bias is actually something that I accepted a long time ago. The transition to FP+ limited my ability to 30 days out to book, versus 90 for resort guests. That's why we didn't do a lot of riding of things like Seven Dwarfs or Flight of Passage. Our average visit is four hours at most, and usually involves eating. The only important perk that they've screwed up is a discount for counter service. I believe we spent a lot more when we had that, and it's been gone for years.

ApolloAndy said:

It’s unlikely that AP’s will purchase Genie+ regularly, but for the guests who are first-in-a-long-time, $15 per day per person is a drop in the bucket.

That describes my family well. We haven't been to Disney in five years but will definitely be booking Genie+ for our days in Magic Kingdom and Hollywood Studios, based on the ride lists. The wild cards?

• If Guardians opens by June then Epcot may be also be a Genie+ add-on for us.
• Depending on price, we are highly considering the Lightning Lane add-on for Rise of the Resistance. The stand-by waits have been hovering around 2 hours. If we are talking in the neighborhood of $10 per person that would be $40 well spent.

My understanding is that RotR's standby line is pretty long during the early morning/wake of rope drop, but not too bad later in the day and towards the evening. Of course, this is just heresay and I haven't been checking the app.

...and scheduling arrivals through the day via individual purchases might change that, too.

Maybe it’s me but I don’t think IAS guests are going to have a significant impact on lines. I just don’t see that many people buying them.

I've been reading mixed reviews on the DVC Facebook page. We'll be there in a few weeks. Just bought our sorcerer passes over the weekend. I'm looking forward to testing it out. We are doing 4 days at Disney parks, so we are estimating between $120 to $260(for my wife and me,)extra for Genie + by the time were are done.

There was woman that explained how it worked for her family at the Magic Kingdom today. Her post was the most insightful of how it worked so far. I am hoping to be an expert by the time we arrive in Orlando. 😉

I've heard/read all kinds of mixed reports. It seems like MaxPass, but you can only book each ride once, the top two rides in each park are excluded, and the cooldown to rebook is 120 minutes (or when you tap in). Also, I can't imagine it being worth it at especially AK but also Epcot. There just aren't enough things to make it worth the $15 (unless you're hopping).

We went to Epcot for lunch today (yeah, that's a thing we do), and prior to leaving I looked at the app. It suggested that we go to Frozen by 10:35 for a 20 minute wait, and suggested Soarin' for after 3. It was interesting to look at the expected wait time data. Didn't do any attractions, but we're going to MK next week, so we'll see how that goes.

Jeff said:

We went to Epcot for lunch today (yeah, that's a thing we do)

^Best part about living in a theme park town! I plan on popping over to Horror Nights on Thursday for dinner.

^^ They give you the option to pay for Lightning lane for the top two rides at the park, and the paid Genie + gives two lower level lightning lane for a total of four a day like the old fast pass system. I believes that's how it's working.

I was reading a post from people that were at Hollywood Studios yesterday. They were able to buy lighting lanes for Rise and Runaway. They also said that some of the wait times were inflated after the Genie + started. They said that Star Tours was no more than 15 minutes the whole time there on previous days. Yesterday it did start out at 75 minutes and dropped back to 20 minutes later.

As a data point, at Shanghai Disneyland you can buy an instant fast track ticket for any ride you like with no limit other than your budget.