Ive read it and honestly still
Dont buy it and if ALL these people are stacking that means there should be a ton of early availability which there isnt. As far as the inventory being gone. Here is my take on that. When FP was around Those rides were pretty much gone already would you agree? Thats been the “complain” atho plenty have said otherwise. So you can have it both ways. So thats 1 ride out of 3 when we pre planned because currently thats all thats out of the mix and its still a nightmare. Everyone gets another ride at 7am thats 2 rides. Still leaves you 1 ride short of ALL the pre planned rides booked when MORE people had access to the system. Again i have absolutely ZERO inside knowledge other than common sense and using some logic and math after experiencing it in its early stages where less people were on it vs FP which everyone was on and booked 3 rides to start the trip. Once you were able to book another ride using Genie there was absolutely nothing remotely close to the actual time so unless you paid for ILL you rode once and then are like now what? Even with 2 they werent going to be close together. I can assure you using FP as a resort guest i was using my 4th ride either before noon or right around there basically each day at ALL parks and i go during Thanksgiving so far from a slow time. Used it during Columbus day week as well another decently busy week and the Presidents week when schools are off at times. So its not like ive gone during dead times of year. Again to me the #s just dont add up. Call me skeptic but they felt charging for the same product was gonna be bad (not sure why they care bc they truly have shown deep down they dont even tho they may say they do. Actions have spoken louder). Give us an awful product. Then “create” a new one at an even higher price thinking owe wow. Thank you Disney. There is No defending this. No way. No how and no way they couldnt expect this disaster and as i stated early on. If they did think this would work. Shame on them and those people need to be take a few lessons & start reading these forums more often. Maybe even go to the parks like an average guest. You went from 3 rides at basically any time before you boarded a plane to now waking up and hoping to hit a lottery to get something at 9 am to then get to refresh and see what we can do. Yea. Sure they thought this would work?!? Rant over for now…
I think that the way Genie+ changes touring styles probably has something to do with it. For example, imagine Suzie Q Mom, planning for her family of 4. She decides to rope drop Frontier Land in the morning, hotel break with naps midday, and reserve her three fast passes for the afternoon. She wants them all in the same area of the park, so she manages to get 7 Dwarves, Pooh, and Small World. She decides to skip Peter Pan unless she seems an unusually short line around parade time, and go ahead and wait for Little Mermaid, Dumbo, and the carousel, because those are low wait times. She has an ADR for an early dinner at Crystal Palace that she knows won't conflict with her Fast Pass times. After dinner she might casually try the "refresh" strategy to see if anything good nearby pops up, but if not, no sweat, she has a good day on the books already.
Now look at Suzie Q Mom with Genie+. If she wants to rope drop, she
literally has to start grabbing Genie+'s at the same time, if she chooses to use Genie+, because
there is no option to just reserve times in the afternoon. So maybe she wouldn't have worried about it in the morning at all before, and saved her precious three Fast Passes for the afternoon, but now it makes no sense not to go ahead and grab whatever comes up. She gets a Genie+ for Thunder Mountain at 10:00 and rope drops Splash Mountain. Now it's 10:30 and the park is filling up. What makes the most sense, from her perspective, is to look for a short line
and to go ahead and grab whatever Genie+ is available. Even if it's not what she really wanted, it's something, right? She zigzags across the park and gets a Genie+ for Little Mermaid and then does a short wait for the carousel. She probably would have waited in line for Little Mermaid before but, whatever, it was the only thing available, and she has this product, so it wouldn't make sense not to use it. She sees a Genie+ time open up for Small Word but it's in several hours and conflicts with her ADR. Frustrated, she uses Genie+ one more time for the Teacups even though no one really wanted to ride that, waits in line for Philharmagic, and goes back to the hotel, still scrolling for Genie+ times for the afternoon. The only thing that comes up is Tomorrowland Speedway so she takes that. By that evening all of the Genie+ times are gone and she can either wait in long lines or choose all of the less popular rides.
FastPass changed people's touring, to my mind, because:
- Your three "locked in" FastPasses were precious, and there was no incentive to overlap that with rope drop. To the contrary, it made more sense to skew towards the afternoon (a few people were so confident of their refresh skills that they wanted to use them all early, but not for most people). Now the opposite is true - you have no option to reserve times and you know Genie+ times are getting taken by other guests every second you wait, so everyone grabs what they can as early as they can pell mell.
- People with FastPasses later in the day couldn't start refreshing, and even if they could, a lot didn't think to do that. Many had already had the day they wanted to have anyways or didn't know about day-of Fast Passes. Genie+ is designed so that every single user is incentivized to get what they can when they can, so there's a lot of incentive to take a "whatever, it's better than nothing" ride. If you can wait thirty minutes for Little Mermaid in standby or twenty with Genie+, well, better than nothing I guess.
- Knowing when their FastPasses were encouraged people to fill in the gaps with other things, schedule-wise. "Oh, no FastPass then, let's plan on a snack / show / break / etc." A lottery system where you never know what might pop up when incentives people to be "on" all the time, always on the hunt for what might pop up.
Just my theory, anyways. I think this is a big part of the reason for limited availability.
