It would be very odd to require consecutive days. What if I have a 10 day ticket but choose to have a pool/break day after 5 park days, would I only be able to book the first 5 days then I’d have to wait until 3 days before the second 5 days I plan to use?
No. The end of the booking window could just be extended by one day to {current date + 3 + length of ticket} each day at 7 am (with a max date of 14 days from the ticket start). So each day you'd be able to book one more day past the initial length of ticket days. This is similar to how FP+ worked for off-site guests - each day, the end of your booking window was extended by one day - the only difference is that under LL-MP the initial booking window would be # of ticket days instead of one day. There's plenty of evidence that G+ just modified the existing FP+ code, so it's not a stretch to think that LL-MP off-site booking could work similarly to FP+.
The details say this:
“Guests can purchase Lightning Lane passes for days they have valid theme park admission starting at 7:00 am Eastern Time on their first day of eligibility.”
That implies to me that the booking is tied to your park ticket and The the window opens either 7 days prior to check-in at an on property hotel or 3 days before the first day of the ticket. Once the window is open you can book as many days as your park ticket is valid for but since the ticket does not require consecutive days why would the bookings?
Again, you're making assumptions.
Off-property is length of ticket, but on-property is length of
stay. So on-property guests
can book non-consecutive days as long as they have a hotel booked for more nights than they have tickets. The scenario of the off-site guests who use their tickets non-consecutively is what developers would call an edge case (possibly even a corner case) and as such would be deemed not worth the effort and expense to accommodate.
The system has to set an end for the booking window. For on-property guests it's simple - check out date; but for off-property guests, the only real options would be a sliding window like FP+ based on the length of their ticket or a fixed 14 days from their ticket start date. They're not going to limit on-property guests to the length of their stay, but then give all off-site guests a wide-open 14 day window regardless of the length of their ticket.
I guarantee you that "length of ticket" was in the design requirements for off-site guest bookings, so if it were to be implemented the way you're speculating, someone would have had to ignore that design requirement to explicitly implement a fixed 14-day window for off site guests. However, testing would show that the end of the booking window and the max available date are always the same date in every scenario for off-site guests regardless of the length of the ticket and it would get flagged as an issue pretty quickly. If it actually gets implemented the way you think it will, several people messed up.
This is coming from nearly 30 years of development experience.
