Want to skip the lines at Disney?
Both the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida and Disneyland in California offer a line-skipping upsell called Lightning Lane. A Lightning Lane is an alternate queue, offered on select attractions, that is designed to take less time in wait in than regular, standby queue for that ride or show.
Why does the Lightning Lane take less time? Because you have to pay extra to access it.
After the pandemic, Disney dropped its old, free Fastpass system in favor of the new, paid Lightning Lanes. There are three ways that you can buy access to Lightning Lanes at Walt Disney World and Disneyland.
At a select number of the most popular attractions, you can pay for a one-time access to that ride's Lightning Lane. This is a Lightning Lane Single Pass, and it is available at the following attractions:
Walt Disney World
Disneyland
Prices for Lightning Lane Single Pass start at $10-25 per person, depending upon the day and attraction. You can buy an Individual Lightning Lane via the official Walt Disney World or Disneyland app. (There will be a big link for buying Lightning Lane on the app home page - you can't miss it.) When you buy a Lightning Lane Single Pass, you will select an available return time to go to the attraction and use the pass.
If you are visiting with a group, such as your family, you will want to create a party for that group in the Disneyland or Walt Disney World My Disney Experience app so that you can all buy and use your Lightning Lanes together. Lightning Lane passes are tied to your Disney tickets, so someone else cannot (legally) use your pass, even if you are not using for a specific attraction.
At Walt Disney World, you can buy a Lightning Lane Single Pass starting at 7am ET seven days in advance of you visit if you have a Walt Disney World Resort hotel reservation. Access opens three days in advance if you do not. Valid theme park admission is required, as well, of course.
At Disneyland, you can buy one once you enter the park. At both resorts, you can enter a Lightning Lane only once per attraction per day.
For other attractions, Disney bundles access to their Lightning Lanes by selling a Lightning Lane Multi Pass.
At Disneyland, the system works pretty simply. When you enter the park, select an attraction via the Tip Board on the Disneyland app, then book an available Lightning Lane return time. As soon as that time passes (or two hours have passed - whichever comes first), you can book a Lightning Lane return time for another attraction. (Remember, you can access a Lightning Lane only one time for each attraction each day). Keep doing this as long as Lightning Lane return times remain available.
Here are attractions offering Lightning Lane access to Multi Pass customers:
Disneyland California Adventure
You can buy Lightning Lane Multi Pass in advance, bundled with your park ticket. (Our partner sells authorized, discounted Disneyland tickets that include Lightning Lane Multi Pass: Get Disneyland tickets.) Or you can buy it via the app when you get to the park, starting at $32 a person.
At the Walt Disney World Resort, it's a bit more complicated. To start, you can start booking Lightning Lane return times in advance of your visit to a Walt Disney World theme park. Guests at Disney hotels can buy Lightning Lane Multi Pass and start making selections seven days in advance of their check-in day. They can book up to three Lightning Lane return times per day for each day of their visit. For assistance in planning a Walt Disney World vacation, please contact our partner for a free, no-obligation vacation quote.
Everyone else can buy Lightning Lane Multi Pass three days in advance of their theme park visit and make up to three return time reservations for that day.
Again, you can enter only Lightning Lane per attraction per day. And Walt Disney World limits which attractions you can schedule return times for in advance of your visit. For most parks, you can select only one advance reservation for an attraction in its "First Group." Your other two selections (or, all three, if you want), must come from the "Second Group."
Here are the First and Second groups for each Walt Disney World theme park.
Magic Kingdom - First group:
Second group:
EPCOT - First group:
Second group:
Disney's Hollywood Studios - First group:
Second group:
Disney's Animal Kingdom does not have the two-tier system. You may pick all three advance selections from these participating attractions:
All other attractions in the parks are first-come, first-served through traditional standby queues.
Once you are inside a park, you may book an additional Lightning Lane return time once your first Lightning Lane time has passed, and so on. To get the most value for Lightning Lane Multi Pass, try to keep three active return times booked for as long as you can during the day.
Yes, you can purchase Lightning Lane Single Passes in addition to your Lightning Lane Multi Pass. But you will not need to book either of those if you use Lightning Lane's third option.
Too complicated for you? If you have the money, Disney's Lightning Lane Premier Pass is its easiest solution for doing a speed run through the parks.
With Lightning Lane Premier Pass, you can enter any Lightning Lane whenever you want - no return time reservations are necessary. And it applies to any attraction offering a Lightning Lane, whether it is on the Single Pass or part of the Multi Pass bundle. The only limit is that you still can enter each individual Lightning Lane only once per day.
It's just show-and-go, making this Disney's easiest implementation of Lightning Lane.
The catch? The price. At Disneyland, Lightning Lane Premier Pass will debut at $400 per person per day for access to all Lightning Lane attractions at Disneyland and Disney California Adventure. At Walt Disney World, Lightning Lane Premier Pass is sold separately by park, with prices ranging from $149 to $449 per person per day, depending upon day and park.
That price is on top of your park admission, which is required to use the pass. Lightning Lane Premier Pass is available starting October 23 at Disneyland to anyone with a Park Hopper ticket or Magic Key annual pass and valid park reservation. At Walt Disney World, Lightning Lane Premier Pass will be available starting October 30 to guests staying at Deluxe resorts or DVC members.
You can book Lightning Lane Premier Pass via the Disneyland app up to two days in advance of your Disneyland Resort theme park visit. In Florida, you will be able to book up to seven days in advance, via the My Disney Experience app. Inventory for Lightning Lane Premier Pass is limited, and Disney says that this is a pilot program, for now.
Disney typically assigns the majority of the capacity on participating attractions to guests entering via the Lightning Lane, in order to keep that wait time much lower than the standby queue.
You can check the current standby queue wait time for any Disney theme park attraction in the Disneyland and Walt Disney World apps. (Navigate to the park maps to find this.) Disney also provides an estimate of wait times throughout the day if you click through each attraction's name on those lists. Check the wait time on a similar day to when you plan to visit, and if they seem reasonable to you, don't bother with Lightning Lane.
If you can't imagine waiting in lines that long, of if you're up for taking a more active approach to managing your day, consider the Lightning Lane Multi Pass. (Or Single Pass for those rides.) Just don't forget to buy it and start using it as soon as you can. And if you have the money for a Lightning Lane Premier Pass, go ahead and splurge on what will be the easiest, most productive day you've ever spent in a Disney theme park.
Whether you buy Lightning Lane or not, please visit our Theme Park Visitors Guides for advice on when to visit the Disneyland and Walt Disney World theme parks, and then how to navigate them once you are there.
Again, for a deal on a Walt Disney World vacation, please contact our sponsor for a free, no-obligation vacation quote.
And for the latest discounts on multi-day Disneyland tickets, including those with Lightning Lane access, please visit our partner's Disneyland tickets page.
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Why do they call it - 'standby' - Why not just call it the Line?
@Brian - So when it takes 3x longer than posted to get on a ride, CMs can remind guests they're in the "standby line", and guests in that line are accommodated when the LL queue is unable to fill all the available seats.
At this point, the amount of changes that have been made to Disney’s expedited queue systems over the last 10 years is obsessive. I wrote a paper this summer where I used a mathematical model to analyze how Genie+ and LL+ impacted wait times during their respective eras, and already the system has been revamped once again. Even as a pretty huge Disney fan these changes have been too much to keep up with, and my gut tells me this will all be different once again 2 years from now.
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Honestly, these changes have made me opt for different approaches to my vacations. I would want to use some form of LL and actually preferred it to FP+. The cost of premiere is prohibitive and will likely diminish the value of the standard LL. I can do a ten day European vacation for less than a Disney trip. Sadly, I will make that choice.