New Lightning Lane option zaps wallets again

THEME PARK INSIDER

Disneyland has a new way to use its line-skipping Lightning Lanes: the $400-a-day Premier Pass. That sum may come as a jolt, but it’s true to the concept of a fast second queue, since few will buy it. Joe Burbank — Orlando Sentinel

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With its new Lightning Lane Premier Pass, Disney finally gets its Lightning Lane system right.

A new option for buying access to Disney’s alternate queues, Lightning Lane Premier Pass debuts this week at the Disneyland Resort and next week at Walt Disney World in Florida. A Disneyland guest who buys a Premier Pass gets onetime access to each Lightning Lane at Disneyland and Disney California Adventure for the day. There’s no need to book return times via the Disneyland app. Just show your pass on your phone and go.

It’s simple — just as a line-skipping pass should be. But I think the best thing about Lightning Lane Premier Pass is the price. At a stunning $400 a pop (to start), it’s a premium upgrade that few Disneyland theme park visitors will purchase. Which is also as it should be.

To paraphrase “The Incredibles” syndrome, when everyone skips the line, no one does. With daily prices for the other Lightning Lane option, the Multi Pass, less than 10% of what Disneyland is charging for the new Premier Pass, thousands of people buy the latter each day, crowding the Lightning Lanes and blowing up the wait times in standby queues.

When close to half the people in the park buy a line-skip pass, that’s no longer much of an upgrade. It’s no wonder many fans have complained the Lightning Lane Multi Pass serves as a stealth price increase — an extra $30-plus per person per day that visitors must pay to get an experience comparable to those when there was just one queue per attraction at Disney.

The situation is worse at Walt Disney World, where visitors can book up to three Lightning Lane return times a day in advance of their visit. Attraction capacity is a zero-sum game. Every spot given to a Lightning Lane guest is one less available to a person waiting in the standby queue.

If Disney sells Lightning Lanes to 40% of the people in the park, it needs to devote much more than 40% of its attraction capacity to Lightning Lane guests in order for those queues to have notably shorter wait times than the regular queues. That inflates wait times for guests using the standby queues.

Of course, the longer those standby wait times become, the more likely that people can be persuaded to spend more money on Lightning Lane. It’s a vicious cycle for fans, but a profitable one for Disney.

If Disney were replacing the Multi Pass with the new Premier Pass, that would be a positive step for all Disney fans. A small group with the means and inclination to pay hundreds of dollars a day could get a truly premium experience speed-running the parks, while the rest of us could go save a little money and enjoy shorter standby queues.

But Disney is keeping the Multi Pass and just adding the Premier Pass on top of that. So the vicious cycle will continue for fans, while Disney adds another lucrative revenue stream.

Robert Niles covers the themed entertainment industry as the editor of ThemeParkInsider.com.