Why Skipping Lightning Lanes Made Our Most Recent Disney World Trip Better

My family of 5 typically visits Walt Disney World Resort at least once a year, and we almost always get Lightning Lane Multi Pass (a paid skip-the-line feature) for 2 or more days during our visits. But on our latest visit, we didn’t get Lightning Lane passes at all — and we loved it.

We experimented without Lightning Lanes because I’ve gotten tired of chasing reservations, feeling limited to mostly doing only what we can reserve with a Lightning Lane, zig-zagging across parks to make arrival times, and generally overthinking everything — all while having to pay extra for it.

Wanting a more relaxed approach, we had a great visit without Lightning Lane passes and found it gave us more flexibility and freedom to enjoy the parks. Here’s how a Lightning Lane-free visit to Disney World worked for us.

How Disney World Lightning Lanes Work

You get skip-the-line privileges at qualifying attractions when you purchase Lightning Lane access. Instead of waiting in the regular standby line, you enter an attraction through a much shorter line. It can save a lot of time and be helpful if you visit the parks with young kids or anyone who doesn’t do well with long lines.

There are 3 Lightning Lane options at Disney World:

• Lightning Lane Multi Pass: This is the most common type of Lightning Lane, and it applies to various attractions. You can choose up to 3 experiences and arrival windows when you purchase it. That includes 1 Tier 1 attraction, such as Slinky Dog Dash or Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, and 2 Tier 2 attractions, such as Haunted Mansion or Kilimanjaro Safaris.
• Lightning Lane Single Pass: A single pass is good for 1 ride on a single attraction that isn’t available with Lightning Lane Multi Pass. These include Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, TRON Lightcycle / Run, Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind, Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, and Avatar Flight of Passage.
• Lightning Lane Premier Pass: This type allows you to get 1 entry into each Lightning Lane experience in a theme park at any time during the day. This is different from the Lightning Lane Multi Pass, which requires selecting from available arrival time windows and may have limited availability.

You can purchase passes up to 7 days before your trip if you’re staying at a Disney resort hotel or 3 days before if you’re not a resort guest. Pricing is dynamic and depends on the park you start in, but it usually costs around $20 to $30 per person. Booking Lightning Lane passes is a great way to ensure you’ll have access to the attractions that are most important to you, which can make the cost worth it.

How We Use Lightning Lane Passes

Our Disney World trips typically span 5 park days, and we’ll get everyone a Lightning Lane Multi Pass for at least 2 to 3 of those days. We almost always get a Lightning Lane Multi Pass when we visit the Magic Kingdom, since there’s so much to cover there.

Only occasionally do we book a Lightning Lane Single Pass. For example, I’ve done it on Avatar Flight of Passage while visiting with a friend who wanted to be sure we’d get to ride.

We’ve never purchased a Lightning Lane Premier Pass, which costs between $129 and $449. As convenient as the pass might be, I’m not willing to pay that much to skip lines, especially when visiting as a family needing 5 passes.

We rarely stay at Disney resorts, which would grant us early access to booking Lightning Lanes, so we typically don’t purchase Lightning Lanes until 3 days before our visit. Sometimes, we wait until we’re there and see that the wait times are long enough to make the pass worth it.

Not booking Lightning Lanes well in advance excludes us from some hard-to-get rides, such as Slinky Dog Dash. I’ve never seen available windows for that ride while visiting the parks. I think we’d need to book it 7 or 3 days out as our Tier 1 attraction to get it.

What We Liked About Lightning Lane Passes

Short Wait Times

We like that we can skip waiting in lines and make plans for rides where we’d otherwise have to wait for more than an hour to get in. That’s especially helpful in long outdoor queues or when the parks have peak crowds.

When our kids were younger and long lines were more challenging, Lightning Lane helped us speed through with fewer opportunities for boredom.

Maximizing Attractions

We can cover a lot of ground when we primarily visit Lightning Lane queues. That’s especially helpful on shorter visits when we want to squeeze a lot in. Having Lightning Lane Multi Pass and a Lightning Lane Single Pass for Avatar Flight of Passage paid off when we visited all 4 parks in 1 day. Visiting as many attractions as we did would have been tough without skip-the-line privileges.

Planning Park-to-Park Transitions

When we’re park hopping, it’s nice to know we already have Lightning Lanes at the next park waiting for us. Knowing when it’s time to leave the first park and head to the next for an upcoming Lightning Lane takes some guesswork out of the transition.

Peace of Mind for High-Priority Rides

Knowing we have a return time for an important attraction takes some pressure off. Our kids are more inclined to have a good attitude about attractions they’re less excited about if they know we’ve got one of their favorites on the books for later that day.

What We Didn’t Like About Lightning Lanes

The Cost

At a typical range of $20 to $30 per day, we can expect to pay about $25 for each Lightning Lane Multi Pass. For our family of 5, that’s about $125 each day.

It’s Sometimes Unnecessary

We’ve booked Lightning Lane arrivals a few times for attractions we could have visited just as fast without a pass, such as Haunted Mansion in the last hour or Tiana’s Bayou Adventure on a cool night.

Lots of Walking

Booking arrival times that work well together is not always easy, so we sometimes ping-pong across the parks to reach our Lightning Lane bookings. For example, we might have to hustle from Space Mountain in Tomorrowland to Jungle Cruise in Adventureland on the other side of the park.

Rigid Plans

Booking Lightning Lanes gives you a deadline, and it can be stressful to nail arrival windows. You can constantly adjust your bookings in the app, but that depends on availability. We often have to stick with less-than-ideal plans because that’s all we can find.

Screen Time

Managing Lightning Lane bookings requires time on our phones using the My Disney Experience app (iOS, Android). As soon as we scan into a Lightning Lane queue, we look for the next attraction to book. We also compare our upcoming Lightning Lane plans to standby wait times to ensure we’re using our passes for lines that would save us time.

Bottom Line:

Lightning Lane Multi Pass adds more fun to our Disney World trips, but also more stress. Managing bookings and making it to attractions within arrival windows helps us maximize our time in the parks while also adding to theme park fatigue.

Why We Didn’t Get Lightning Lane Passes This Time

Several factors made it easy to skip Lightning Lane on our latest trip. Our kids are old enough to manage waiting in lines, many of our must-do attractions don’t typically have long queues, we had plans to reverse-rope-drop, and we had extended evening hours access. We went into it knowing we might miss a few things, but had plans to cover everything important to us.

With a teen and 2 tweens, we’re past the parenting stage where we have to worry about antsy kids in attraction lines while filling a backpack with endless snacks and entertainment. As long as we have our refillable popcorn bucket, water bottles, and mobile devices, we can all handle lines, especially when playing games like Disney Heads Up! together or interacting with features in the queue.

Although we wanted to enjoy some headliner attractions, most of our must-dos on the trip didn’t have Lightning Lanes or were known to have low wait times. On our check-in day at Disney’s Yacht Club Resort, we used our resort benefit to visit Disney’s Typhoon Lagoon, where there are no Lightning Lanes. We visited food booths, gardens, and topiaries at the EPCOT International Flower & Garden Festival. Another big priority was an extended visit to Tom Sawyer Island, which didn’t have a Lightning Lane, and other can’t-miss attractions for the trip typically had low wait times, such as Muppet*Vision 3D and The Liberty Square Riverboat.

We reverse-rope-dropped a few nights, enjoying low wait times around closing time for some of our favorite headliner rides. For our late night at EPCOT, we got into Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind right before park closing time and had only a 40-minute wait. At Hollywood Studios, we rode Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance and Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway within the hour before the park closed. We got on Avatar Flight of Passage as our last ride before leaving Animal Kingdom for the night, and only waited about half an hour.

Staying at Disney’s Yacht Club Resort, we got access to extended evening hours at the Magic Kingdom for that night. That gave us 2 hours after the official park closing time to enjoy attractions with low wait times. We visited attractions we might otherwise use a Lightning Lane pass to access, including TRON Lightcycle / Run, Space Mountain, and Peter Pan’s Flight.

Cost is always a factor, and I wanted to budget differently for this trip. The savings from not buying Lightning Lane passes helped us with other costs, such as staying a night at Disney’s Yacht Club Resort, visiting all the EPCOT International Flower & Garden Festival food booths we wanted, and dining at Sanaa at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge.

What I Liked About Skipping Lightning Lane Passes

I worried we might regret not getting Lightning Lane passes, but this was one of our best-ever Disney World visits. I’ve gotten tired of the mental and physical fatigue of Lightning Lanes — always planning ahead, racing to reservations, and feeling overscheduled. Our experience without Lightning Lane passes helped us slow down and enjoy the parks more with spontaneity and better flow.

When we get Lightning Lane passes, we feel the need to maximize our time with them by booking as many attractions as possible. Without reservation deadlines this time, we flowed through the parks more logically and relaxed, and didn’t spend all day on our phones in the My Disney Experience app trying to get a step ahead.

Visiting an attraction was as easy as being in an area of the park, looking at the wait time, and deciding whether to wait that long or move on to something else.

We enjoyed indoor queues and viewed them as breaks from the heat rather than resenting them. It was way better than hustling through the crowds in the sun to make our next arrival window.

Rediscovering queue details and interactivity was also fun, such as Tinkerbell in Peter Pan’s Flight. You skip past a lot of the fun stuff in a Lightning Lane queue.

We rode Slinky Dog Dash for the first time, which has always been an elusive Lightning Lane reservation for us. With an outdoor queue that often extends past the shaded main queue area, it’s an attraction we’ve unfortunately never made time for — until on this trip, we saw the ride go down on the My Disney Experience app.

With no Lightning Lane reservations to commit us elsewhere, we were free to make our way to the area to get in line right as it came back online. We only had a 30-minute wait in the shade.

Bottom Line:

Although we didn’t visit as many attractions as usual, we felt more present and relaxed. I liked the freedom and ease of going with the flow, even if it meant missing out on a few attractions.

Disney World Queue Tricks That Worked for Us

Even without Lightning Lane passes, we covered a lot of ground during our visit to Disney World. These are some of the strategies we use to handle queues.

Time Your Visits Right

Many lines are short first thing in the morning, and get shorter during the hours close to park closing. During peak summer, be sure to prioritize indoor queues during afternoon hours.

In addition, if you’re OK with missing a fireworks show, you can ride high-demand attractions with lower wait times. When a ride goes down, watching the My Disney Experience app to visit as soon as it reopens can also be a strategic move.

Use Resort Benefits

Take advantage of early entry and extended evening hours to get exclusive access outside of regular park operating hours.

Bring Entertainment

Pack mobile devices and extra chargers for something to do while waiting in line.

When Do Lightning Lane Passes Make Sense?

Lightning Lane Multi Pass makes sense for a few travelers, including first-timers (or infrequent visitors who want to do as much as possible), anyone who can’t tolerate long waits, and during busy park days.

Adding Lightning Lane Single Pass can be a good compromise if you’re willing to wait for most attractions but want to avoid especially long queues on extremely popular rides, such as TRON Lightcycle / Run and Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind.

Final Thoughts

Visiting Disney World without Lightning Lane passes was a fun experiment that exceeded expectations. It was nice to embrace a slower and more flexible approach to the parks while freeing up room in our budget for resort and dining experiences.

Will we ever get Lightning Lane passes again? Of course. We will still sometimes use Lightning Lane Multi Pass, but much more selectively, and we might prioritize Lightning Lane Single Pass over Lightning Lane Multi Pass.

If we want a more relaxed trip and are fine with missing some attractions, we will confidently skip buying a Lightning Lane Multi Pass. But if we have can’t-miss attractions and want to cover a lot of ground and do as much as possible, a Lightning Lane Multi Pass makes sense, even if we just do it for a couple of days on our visit.