Disneyland – Lightning Lane
On a recent two-day trip to Disneyland, we decided to “experiment” with Lightning Lane. We were there on Wednesday and Thursday right before Halloween. The Wednesday crowd forecast was about a 3 and on Thursday it was about a 7 (based on a scale of 1 to 10). We wanted to maximize our number of rides. Here is how it broke down:
Wednesday: We purchased Lightning Lane Multi Pass along with individual Lightning Lane for Radiator Springs Racers and Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance. Total cost for that day was $79.75 per person. On that day we rode a total of 14 rides with the only one that we rode without a Lightning Lane was Pirates of the Caribbean. We never miss Pirates of the Caribbean since it is Peter’s favorite ride!
Just as a reminder, you can only book rides using Lightning Lane after admission to a park and then you can only book three at a time. Once you have used one, you can use another lightning lane. The individual Lightning Lane passes do not count in the 3 that you can do at a time. As you can imagine, it takes a bit of coordination to make sure you hit all your favorite rides and it was much easier to get times on a day that wasn’t that crowded.
Thursday: We purchased Lightning Lane Premier Pass for $349 per person. That day we rode 15 rides (again the only one we rode without Lightning Lane was Pirates of the Caribbean). What is nice about Premier Pass is that you can ride everything once with no reservation and no need to purchase those individual Lightning Lanes.
So, it is quite a difference in price to ride essentially the same number of rides, but it was also significantly more crowded on Thursday. The other thing is that as frequent park goers, we don’t go insanely crazy trying to ride everything – we know we will ride it next time or sometimes we just say to heck with it. If we pushed really hard and did an all-day cram session – we could have ridden significantly more rides with the Premier Pass. So, our experience is a bit different than yours might be.
That being said, my guess is that had we experienced the same sized crowds on Wednesday we would probably have ridden only about half the number of rides with just the regular Lightning Lane Multi-pass. If you are going at a busy time, you may want to consider Premier Pass as it does take the stress off planning BUT also adds significant cost!
