No getting around it: Lightning Lane Multi Pass costs extra at an already expensive destination. Yet, it can also make a big difference in your enjoyment of your Disneyland Resort visit. Whether you view it as a waste of money or a great value depends on how well you use it. We believe Lightning Lane Multi Pass is a good value and a worthwhile purchase, we also believe we have learned how to use it very effectively. Here, we are sharing nine strategies for using Lightning Lane Multi Pass to its greatest potential.
This post is the second in a series on Lightning Lane Multi Pass. If you are not familiar with the rules and basic functions of this ticket add-on, we suggest first reading part one: Big Guide to Lightning Lane Multi Pass at Disneyland Resort. That post will teach you how to use Lightning Lane Multi Pass, and this post will teach you how to use it like a pro. Once you have the basics, come back here for our advanced strategies for using Lightning Lane Multi Pass at Disneyland Park and Disney California Adventure Park.
Park Hopper Plus Lightning Lane Multi Pass is a Powerful Combo
The majority of this post is going to be about booking strategies for Lightning Lane Multi Pass, but before we jump into those, we want to point out a pre-purchase consideration. Lightning Lane Multi Pass plus Park Hopper is a powerful combination.
Park Hopper is a ticket add-on that allows you to visit both parks of Disneyland Resort in one day. When you have both Park Hopper and Lightning Lane Multi Pass, you have the power to make Lightning Lane reservations in both parks. Having a Park Hopper increases your pool of potential Lightning Lanes considerably, but you will pay the same daily rate for your Lightning Lane Multi Pass whether you are using it in one park or two.
As long as you have a Park Hopper, you are even able to make Lightning Lane Multi Pass reservations for one park while visiting the other one. Of course, like Lighting Lane Multi Pass, a Park Hopper comes at an additional cost. You will need to decide whether it fits within your budget. For help making decisions about these services, see our article here.
Get Started Early with Lightning Lane Multi Pass Reservations
To maximize the number of Lightning Lane Multi Pass reservations you can make in one day, start booking early!
Hopefully you have started your Lightning Lane Multi Pass education by reading our Big Guide to Lightning Lane Multi Pass at Disneyland Resort. If you have, you know that you may begin booking reservations for Lightning Lane Multi Pass as soon as you enter either Disneyland Park or Disney California Adventure Park. Even if you enter before official park opening (as we like to do), you may begin making reservations immediately.
Just remember that all reservation time slots are within official park hours. Even if you have Early Entry, there are no reservation times available during Early Entry.
For Example:
Imagine you have just entered Disneyland Park at 7:30am in anticipation of official park opening at 8:00am. You immediately open your Disneyland app at 7:31am to book a Lightning Lane Multi Pass reservation. You notice that the only available times are for after 8:00am opening. This is not a glitch. No matter how quickly you book, there are never reservations offered for times before opening. You book a Star Tours – The Adventures Continue pass for 9:30-10:30am and then grab a coffee.
So, why be in such a hurry to book a reservation during a low-attendance time of day? Again, if you have read part one of this Lightning Lane Multi Pass guide, you know that there is a waiting period in between booking reservations. Once you make a Lightning Lane Multi Pass reservation, you cannot make another one until you either scan into that reservation or until two hours have passed. With your chance to make reservations being so spaced-out, you will want to make your first one early to fit more booking opportunities into your day.
However, we usually do not recommend that you make those reservations for an early time slot…
But Ride Late
Though you will want to start snagging Lightning Lane Multi Pass reservations early, we do not recommend that you select early morning time slots.
If you take our advice and arrive at the Disneyland Resort parks early, you will hopefully be enjoying some low crowds. This should play out in short wait times for regular standby queues. Do not squander those golden mornings! Do not book Lightning Lane Multi Pass reservations with arrival times during the first couple hours after opening. Instead, use those hours to experience attractions that do not use Lightning Lanes or that you will want to ride more than once.
Remember, you only get one Lighting Lane Multi Pass reservation per ride per day. If you use many of those reservations in the morning, you will miss out two-fold. First, because you will not have those reservations for your use later in the day (when standby wait times really explode), and second, you will be missing the opportunity to ride many attractions with minimal wait.
What should you do during the first two to three hours after opening? We recommend that you do this at Disneyland Park and this at Disney California Adventure Park. On extremely crowded days, you may need to alter this strategy, but it should apply to many days at Disneyland Resort.
So, we told you to make your first reservation as soon as possible, but then we said not to make it for the soonest possible time. That may seem like impossibly contradictory advice, but the next two Lightning Lane strategies should help you make the last two work together. Just stick with us.
Prioritize Popular Attractions for a Good Lightning Lane Strategy
If you want to get started booking Lightning Lane Multi Pass reservations early in the day without also using all of them early in the day, we suggest prioritizing popular attractions.
Remember, you do not get to pick your reservation time from a variety of times as if you are making a dinner reservation. At the time you book your Lightning Lane, the Disneyland app will offer you the earliest arrival window. You can book that arrival window or wait until a time you like better is offered. Reservations for popular attractions fill-up more quickly than reservations for less popular attractions. For this reason, the popular attractions’ return times are usually later in the day. Booking a popular attraction soon after you enter the park may land you a late morning time slot. How late depends on the crowds during your visit and whether that attraction is experiencing downtime.
Beware the Sell-Out
The other reason to book popular attractions early is that these attractions can and do “sell out.” This means that all of their available reservations have been claimed by other guests and no more are offered for the day.
Unless you are lucky enough to snag a canceled reservation (more on this later), you will not be using Lightning Lane Multi Pass on these “sold out” attractions. Common culprits for this include Indiana Jones Adventure, Space Mountain and Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: BREAKOUT! Disney does not guarantee that you will be able to use Lightning Lane Multi Pass on all of the attractions included in the service.
And Watch for Attraction Closures
Reservations for Indiana Jones Adventure are especially susceptible to running out because this ride is very popular and frequently closes due to maintenance issues. Because the closures are unplanned, they can last for a short time or for hours. This can have a two-sided impact on your Lightning Lane strategies.
First, you will want to be aware of unscheduled ride closures for Indiana Jones Adventure and other attractions, because less open hours means less reservations for guests, and those remaining reservations will likely sell-out. This can be detrimental to your Lightning Lane strategy if you are not paying attention.
On the positive side, when an attraction is closed during your reservation arrival window, you are compensated with a Multiple Experiences Pass (MEP). This pass really is very valuable! So, booking a reservation for a frequently closed attraction can have benefits. We will cover more of that later, but for now, just be aware of ride closures during your visit.
Do Not Cancel Your Lightning Lane, Modify Instead
The other way to book early but ride late with Lightning Lane Multi Pass is to use the modify tool. If you have a Lightning Lane reservation that you cannot or do not want to use, you can push it to another time by modifying it. If you modify your reservation, rather than canceling it, you get to keep your original booking waiting period. This takes a little explaining, so please keep reading.
When you modify a Lightning Lane Multi Pass reservation, you will replace an existing reservation with a new one. The new reservation can be for the same attraction you previously booked or for a different one. Either way, your reservation will be for the next available arrival time, just as if you were canceling a reservation and booking a brand new one. The key difference has to do with the booking wait time.
You already know that you cannot make a new Lightning Lane Multi Pass reservation until you either scan into your most recently booked reservation or until two hours have passed since you last made a reservation. The benefit of modifying rather than canceling has to do with this two hour rule. When you cancel a reservation and book a new one, the two-hour waiting period starts from the time you make that new reservation. But, when you modify, you preserve your original booking waiting period. An example is helpful here…
An Example
Here is an example of using the modify feature for Disneyland’s Lightning Lane Multi Pass. It is 10:00am, and you make a Lightning Lane Multi Pass reservation for Soarin’ with an arrival window of 1:00-2:00pm. Your arrival time is more than two hours away, so you know that the next time you will be eligible to make a reservation is at 12:00pm (two hours from now).
But, now it is 11:30am, and you realize that your Soarin’ reservation will interfere with the time you are planning to eat lunch. You decide that you want to change your reservation to the new arrival time of 4:00-5:00pm.
If you cancel your Soarin’ reservation from earlier and immediately book a new one, the next time you will be eligible to make another reservation will not be until 1:30pm (two hours from the present time). However, if you modify your earlier reservation to the new arrival time, you will still be eligible to book your next reservation beginning at 12:00pm (just thirty minutes from now). By modifying, you will keep your original waiting period from your pre-modified reservation!
It is almost always more beneficial to modify than it is to cancel a reservation. You can also see how you can use this method to keep booking Lightning Lane Multi Pass reservations every two hours from opening, even if you are not sure if you like the reservation times initially being offered.
Keep On Booking
This is a good opportunity to emphasize that you should book a new LIghtning Lane Multi Pass reservation whenever you get the chance. A little heading on your Disneyland app should tell you when you are next eligible. Anytime that you are able to book a reservation—whether you just scanned into your most recently booked Lightning Lane or whether it has been two hours since you last booked—book your next reservation!
If the times you are seeing look like they might be less than ideal, grab one anyway. When in doubt, book something and then modify it later. In this way, you make sure that you are able to make the maximum number of bookings for the day.
Stockpiling or Stacking Lightning Lanes at Disneyland
You are probably now seeing some patterns in our Lightning Lane strategies. We are encouraging you to make your Lightning Lane Multi Pass reservations for the most crowded times of the day and to continuously “stack” Lightning Lanes throughout the day by booking one every two hours. When experienced Disneyland guests refer to “stacking Lightning Lanes,” they usually mean holding more than one reservation at a time. This is absolutely allowed.
(Bad) Example:
Many inexperienced guests will just use Lightning Lane Multi Pass reservations one at a time. They will grab an early Lightning Lane reservation. After scanning into that first reservation, they will book their second, then scan into the second and book the third and so on. This is possible, because they can book a new Lightning Lane Multi Pass reservation as soon as they scan into their most recently booked reservation. At first glance, this seems like a logical way to use Lightning Lane Multi Pass and is the way most of us probably used it when we were starting out.
The problem these inexperienced guests run into is that they are using their “skip the line” passes during times when lines are already low. We suggest that it is better to strategically save reservations for later in the day. Remember, every passholder only gets one reservation per attraction per day, so they might run out of passes right when they will want them most. Furthermore, because these guests are also probably grabbing the attractions with the earliest reservation times, they are likely not prioritizing popular attractions with increasingly late return times. Sadly, they may miss the chance to use their Lightning Lane Multi Pass on the most popular rides in Disneyland Resort!
But, you know better. You will use the two-hour rule to keep stacking Lightning Lane reservations throughout the day while targeting time slots during the midday crowds. Plus, you will keep an eye on popular attractions. You will even continue to book reservations if you are outside of the park. Remember, once you have initially scanned into either park for the day, you may book reservations even when you are somewhere else, like your hotel.
Treasure Your Multiple Experiences Passes
What happens if you have been diligently reserving Lightning Lanes and optimizing your day and suddenly… a ride is closed during your reservation time? We touched upon this earlier to say that this situation can be a gift, so let us dive into why that is.
During every visit, we have rides unexpectedly close during our reservation times, and that can actually be pretty great. You see, if you are holding a Lightning Lane Multi Pass reservation, and your reserved attraction is not open during your arrival window, you will be compensated. If a ride is unexpectedly down for maintenance or another reason during your reservation, you should automatically receive a Multiple Experiences Pass (or MEP).
This Multiple Experiences Pass is golden! You can use it to access the priority queue for one of a number of eligible attractions. A Multiple Experiences Pass can be even more valuable than a regular Lightning Lane pass for three reasons: (1) it does not count against the one reservation per attraction per day rule, (2) you do not need to make a reservation to use it and (3) it can work on some attractions that do not even have Lightning Lanes!
Multiple Experiences Passes are amazing, and we really want to help you use them well, so we wrote a whole advice post about it here: How to Use a Multiple Experiences Pass at Disneyland. That article is consistently among the most popular posts on this site, and we encourage you to read it. We spent a long time carefully putting together this detailed guide, and it will take you through how to get and use Multiple Experiences Passes well.
Refresh, Refresh and… Refresh
We are close to the end of our Lightning Lane Multi Pass strategies, and it is time to come back to something we mentioned earlier in this post. We indicated that there is hope even when attraction slots “sell out” and Lightning Lane Multi Pass reservations are no longer available for one or more attractions.
You might open your Disneyland app to see that the “Multi Pass Experience” for a certain favorite attraction is “Not Currently Offered.” This probably means that all of the reservation time slots have been claimed for that attraction for that day. But hang in there, because canceled reservations can be up for grabs. If another guest cancels their Lightning Lane Multi Pass for a “sold out” attraction, you will see that arrival time reappear in the app. Grab it fast!
These canceled reservations go fast, and you are most likely to spot them if you are actively refreshing your screen. Just “pull down” on the screen to refresh and repeat. There seems to be varied times when Disney releases a batch of reservations for previously sold-out rides. There is no advertised time for this, so it is worth checking periodically.
You can also use these refresh method if you are simply looking to modify your reservation to one that is more favorable to your schedule. Refresh to see the newest available arrival times, and modify when you see something that you like.
Line Time is App Time
That previous tip is great if you are trying to snag a coveted reservation, but all of that refreshing can also really eat into a fun vacation. We have spent the last couple thousand words sharing advanced strategies for using Lightning Lane Multi Pass at Disneyland Resort. And, we hope that we these tips will help you get the best value out of that service. However, we do not want you to optimize, maximize and refresh your way out of an actually enjoyable visit to Disneyland, so we suggest setting some parameters around your Disneyland app screen time.
Decide on some personal app-use rules that will keep you happy. In our family, we make line-time our Disneyland app-time. In other words, when we are stuck waiting in a queue, we use that time well by refreshing or strategizing while we wait. Then, we put our mobile devices away and take in the wonder around us.
Make Your Own App-Time Rules
Yes, we know that we just repeatedly encouraged you to make your next reservation as soon as you are eligible, but we want to temper that advice a bit. We encourage you to modify these Lightning Lane strategies to work within your own best practices. For example, you could decide that you will make a reservation as soon as you are able, as long as you are also standing in a line. You may lose fifteen minutes in your booking window, but you might make up for it by enjoying yourself more. Alternatively, you could set an alarm to alert you to when you are next eligible to make a reservation. When the alarm sounds, you can quickly make a reservation and then evaluate and modify it when you are next standing in a line.
Ultimately these Lightning Lane Multi Pass strategies are meant to serve you and not the other way around. We hope that they will help you get the best value our of your Lightning Lane Multi Pass, and that means fun, not work.
Thank you for reading this guide to advanced Lightning Lane Multi Pass strategies at Disneyland Park and Disney California Adventure Park.
We hope that you have found this article helpful. This is the second part in a series of posts on Lightning Lane Multi Pass. The first post covers the basic function and rules of Lightning Lane Multi Pass at Disneyland Resort, and you can find it here: Big Guide to Lightning Lane Multi Pass at Disneyland Resort. For other important strategies for saving time in line at Disneyland, we suggest: Maximize Your Disneyland Experience: Beat the Lines & Save Time. That page is part of our larger Step-by-Step Disneyland Prep, which we recommend to anyone planning a visit to Disneyland Resort in California. Finally, please consider subscribing to our free newsletter below to get the latest posts right in your inbox. Thanks again for reading!