“A Genie By Any Other Name” – The Nonsense Naming of Disney Genie+… And An Idea to Fix It

Shakespeare’s Juliet once mused, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet!” She was right, of course… But had Juliet been responsible for explaining how to grow one to a family from Brazil, she might wish she had concise, clear, and intuitive language to use.

That’s the reality faced by Cast Members responsible for helping guests at Disney Parks to understand why they’re several steps away from being able to access the sold-out Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance Individual Lightning Lane they’re blocking the entrance to.

Stand-by. Virtual Queue. Lightning Lane. Individual Ride Reservations. Boarding Groups… The language of waiting in line at a Disney Park in the 2020s is enough to leave even the most ardent theme park aficionados puzzled. But it doesn’t have to be that way! Let’s take a glance at the Disney Genie Glossary and propose a quick fix that would sure help clear things up…

The Setup

It all started at the semi-annual D23 Expo in 2019 when, during the Parks, Experiences, and Products presentation, then-Chairman of the division Bob Chapek announced DISNEY GENIE – “a revolutionary new digital offering that will enhance the way guests plan for and experience a trip to Walt Disney World Resort.”

Said the Disney Parks Blog: “Disney Genie will make planning easier and more fun by providing guests customized itineraries geared to princesses, thrill seekers, foodies, families, and more. Guests will even be able to tell Disney Genie what they want to experience, and it will quickly evaluate millions of options to present them with an optimal day.”

Imagined by fans as a Disney-made tool to fix the Disney-made problems we explored in our in-depth, Member-exclusive “MyMagic Minus“ Special Feature (namely, the 2010s’ emphasis on pre-planning, pre-booking, and pre-scheduling), Disney Genie sounded like a pretty innocuous itinerary-building app that would probably do some amount of vacation planning for you for free, and probably more vacation planning for you (think, FastPass+ and Dining Reservations without the 6AM wakeup) if you were willing to pay.

No one could’ve known that the very next year, every Disney Park on Earth would close due to COVID-19, or that when the parks re-opened, it would be without many of the services and perks guests knew and loved (and only occasionally loathed), including FastPass.

So when details of Disney Genie re-emerged in 2021, the core service was still a complimentary planning software… but given the option (or maybe, order) to seek out new revenue streams, the pre-announced Disney Genie brand had been co-opted into a suite of interconnected “services,” upcharges, and relabelings requiring a glossary to understand…  So…

The Disney Genie Glossary

Setting aside criticism of why it exists or how it operates, let’s be sure we’ve got Genie’s naming conventions straight…

DISNEY GENIE is an itinerary-building software that’s nested within the My Disney Experience app. Theoretically, it “learns” about you, considers your preferences, then builds an activity-by-activity plan for your day based on the specific experiences, “Interests” (i.e. “Princesses,” “Villains,” “Star Wars,” “Live Entertainment,” “Park Classics,” and “Thrill Rides”), and of course rides you tell it to include.

In practice, it’s almost hilariously bad at it, leaving multi-hour stretches entirely unscheduled, seemingly making no special effort to get you on the rides you ask it to prioritize, routinely insisting that not just one, but two solo, middle-aged men spend time at the Disney Junior Dance Party, and hilariously recommending users spend the all-important “rope drop” hour touring California Adventure’s walkthrough sourdough bread bakery or race to Disneyland’s walk-on Fantasyland dark rides.

Far exceeding any given ride or attraction, the most frequent recommendation you’ll find across Disney Genie itineraries is the suggestion to upgrade the service for a fee…

DISNEY GENIE+ (that’s, “Disney Genie Plus“) is a park ticket upgrade that unlocks app-based services for a daily fee (ranging from $15 to $30 across resorts and times of year). Disney Genie+ includes a handful of relatively inconsequential smartphone app features (like selfie filters and audio tours), but without a doubt, the reason 100 out of 100 Disney Genie+ users purchase the service is the ability to access a day-of virtual queue reservation system, booking lower-wait return times for participating attractions (“coincidentally,” nearly everything that used to be equipped with FastPass) across the parks.

Just like the “good old days” of paper FastPass (and more accurately, nearly exactly like the digital, app-based, $15/day add-on MaxPass service Disneyland offered concurrently with paper FastPass from 2017 to 2020), guests with the Genie+ ticket upgrade can book rolling reservations for attractions throughout the day, scheduling access priority boarding queues with the same “rules” FastPass once employed (brilliantly enumerated by the Disney Tourist Blog’s look at one-at-a-time reservation holds, “stacking” return windows, the “two hour” clause, etc.).

In other words, though Disney Genie+ is technically a multi-faceted suite of services with multiple components nested beneath it, it might as well just have one: “paid-for FastPass.” Obviously the replacement of a “free” (read: included with admission) perk with a pretty blatantly unchanged upcharge variation is controversial enough.

But more to the point of our look into the system’s naming nightmare, is Genie+ actually Disney Genie (above), plussed? Would you intuitively recognize that “plussing” the itinerary-building software would allow you access to a virtual queue reservation system, with its own convoluted bylaws, logistics, and limitations? And even if you could clearly and concisely explain why “plussing” Disney Genie would allow you reservation-based access to priority boarding, would you expect the specialized queues that Genie grants you access to to be called…

LIGHTNING LANES are the new designation for the priority boarding queues once used for returning FastPass guests. Forget any association with Lightning McQueen from Cars. This is just regular old lightning; flashing… quick… fast… the kind you… associate with… Genies? Er…? Anyway, just about every ride that had a FastPass line merely swapped its signage to evolve into a Lightning Lane line… Working out the arithmetic: the Genie+ service allows you to make Genie+ reservations that allow you to enter Lightning Lane queues… er, most Lightning Lane queues… because there’s also…

INDIVIDUAL LIGHTNING LANE may make it sound like you can forego Genie+ and just buy a la carte, one-off Lightning Lane access to the rides you want, but of course not. Instead, it’s the “is-that-all-they-could-come-up-with?” term for access to the priority boarding queues of select, high-demand attractions that are excluded from Genie+ and require a premium purchase. Individual Lightning Lane rides are not included in Genie+; likewise, Genie+ Lightning Lane attractions cannot be purchased individually.

One or two rides at each park are designated as Individual Lightning Lane attractions. It’s the name of a product, but it’s also used as a modifier – so, Frozen Ever After has a Lightning Lane that requires an Individual Lightning Lane reservation for access, and thus is one of EPCOT’s two Individual Lightning Lane attractions.

So imagine, if you will, being the Cast Member tasked with explaining to a family from Minnesota who’s blocking the Lightning Lane entrance of Slinky Dog Dash that this is not the FastPass line they remember from their last visit in 2015; it’s now called a Lightning Lane, and the only way to book a return time for it is to upgrade each family member’s park ticket to include Disney Genie+ for $15 per person via the My Disney Experience app and use the new Genie Tip Board to secure one-at-a-time reservations…

But it’s too late anyway, because Lightning Lane slots for Slinky Dog Dash were fully booked within one minute of Lightning Lane bookings becoming available to guests with Genie+ at 7 AM – hours before the park opened – so even if they were willing to pay, the only way to ride the ride will be via the hour-long Standby line.

And full disclosure: purchasing Genie+ won’t give them the chance to book into every Lightning Lane, since each park’s two most popular attractions’ Lightning Lanes are not included in Genie+ and instead require Individual Lightning Lane purchases, and unlike Genie+ Lightning Lanes, Individual Lightning Lanes can’t be purchased by off-site guests until the park opens, by which time there may not be any left to purchase even if they wanted to.

Now imagine explaining that to a family from Brazil, Germany, or Japan.

Make no mistake: some say that Disney’s new terms are intentionally opaque, and purposefully convoluted; that nefariously, the very idea is to confound guests into just tapping “Check Out” in the app as many times as needed, making continuous microtransaction purchases throughout the day to make problems go away and get on must-see rides during a once-in-a-decade trip. After all, if Disney wanted to make things clearer, they obviously could’ve. To prove it, let’s try…

The Fix

Here’s our pitch.

Remember the complimentary itinerary-building software built into the My Disney Experience app? How about if we don’t give it a name. After all, it’s merely the Disney World app getting “smarter,” offering a new Tip Board and My Day tab. Sure, that goes against Disney’s inherent desire to market it like a valuable product in its own right, but for our example “fix,” let’s just leave it unnamed. The My Disney Experience app now just includes a daily plan assembler. Easy.

Let’s call the park ticket upgrade that unlocks app-based services including access to a day-of virtual queue reservation system Disney Genie (no “Plus” needed since there’s no un-plussed version). Then, we’ll rename the priority boarding queues it gets you into Magic Lanes. (Get it? Genie? Magic? A-ha! A motif!) Altogether, let’s refer to the service as DISNEY GENIE WITH MAGIC LANE. (A name that explicitly ties the branded “service” to the intuitively-co-branded “product” you’re buying it for.)

Finally, that pesky access to the priority boarding queues of select attractions that are excluded from the service and require a premium purchase… Hmm… How about if they required MAGIC LANE+ purchases. Yes, the return of the “plus,” this time, indicating a thing you know and understand, but intuitively, logically made better! Yes, a Magic Lane… but plussed! Rather than sounding like an omission or exclusion with an ineffective and unintuitive modifier like “Individual Lightning Lane,” the name “Magic Lane+” insinuates something is better; upgraded; exclusive… and most importantly, separate.

Used in a sentence: “AVATAR Flight of Passage is so popular, you have to buy a Magic Lane+ to skip the line instead of using regular old Disney Genie with Magic Lane.” It really is just that simple. And Disney – the world’s leading entertainment company with a wealth of creatives, copywriters, industrial organizational psychologists, and brand specialists – knows it… which should make you wonder…

Look, our goal here wasn’t to explain – much less excuse! – the existence of Disney’s new Genie suite of “services.” Trust us: we’re not trying to insinuate that the roll-out of layered, add-on upcharges is a good move, that it makes operational or strategic sense, or that guests should buy in. What we do want to do is to work within the lines Disney has drawn – for better or worse! – to prove that at the very least, the company could make it easier for guests to understand their complex new offerings… if they wanted to.

So next time you or a Cast Member has to explain the absurdly complex and seemingly nonsensical language of Disney Parks’ new guest service “solution,” think about it… A rose by any other name may not smell any sweeter, but it sure can be easier to talk about with visitors from non-English-speaking countries.

What do you think of our proposed “fix” to Disney Genie+’s confusing and disconnected naming conventions? Will “Individual Lightning Lane” ever roll off the tongue? Will “Genie+” reach “FastPass” levels of cultural recognition? Do you think Disney intentionally made it hard to understand what Genies, Lightning Lanes, and plusses have to do with each other to wring a few more bucks out of guests who are willing to pay to make lines go away? Let us know in the comments below.