Best Individual Lightning Lanes to Purchase
If you are in the middle of planning your first WDW vacation in a while, you have probably seen lots of talk about ILL. Is everyone coming down with some weird Disney-related sickness? Well, maybe, but that’s not what ILL means. It stands for Individual Lightning Lane attractions – big headliners that Disney now charges you extra for if you want to skip the standby line. Have more questions about how ILLs work? See Step-By-Step Guide: How to Use Genie+ and Lightning Lane at Disney World.
Some Individual Lightning Lane purchases can actually be a decent value if you don’t mind shelling out the extra cash, or if you’re really tight on time or are travelling with humans that don’t deal well with long lines. But making those decisions in a smart, informed way requires some data. So today we’ll walk through a few different datasets that can help you determine which are the best Individual Lightning Lanes to purchase! This post has been updated with the most recent data as of March 6th, 2023.
Explain the Math!
In this post, just like the ones that dealt with Genie+, you will see three different tables. Each table represents data from a group of different crowd levels:
- LOW = crowd levels 1 through 4
- MED = crowd levels 5 through 7
- HIGH = crowd levels 8 through 10
In each box, you’ll see two different pieces of information. The first is represented by the color of each box.
So you can pick an attraction (row) and a time that you think you’ll be able to book an ILL return time (let’s call this the booking time for simplicity, and those are shown in the columns). The color of the box where you land will show you what the odds of you being able to get a return time are. If it’s green, that means you can absolutely always successfully get a return time. If it’s red, that means the attraction is always sold out by that time. If it’s yellow, you have a 50% chance of being able to book it.
And, we’re also adding in some bonus information. Woohoo! In each colored box, you’ll also see a time. That’s the average earliest return time you should expect for that attraction at that booking time, given the appropriate crowd level. Wow. That’s a lot of qualifiers. This is slightly more confusing even than the Genie+ average return times, because for ILL at WDW, you get the luxury of choosing your return time. So in order to present useful information, this chart is showing you earliest available as a way of giving information about what you can expect the earliest return window option to be if, for example, you can’t book Rise of the Resistance until the park opens because you are staying off-site.
So if we take that example and say that I’m visiting Hollywood Studios on a high crowd day. I’m staying offsite, so I can’t book ILL until the park opens at 9 am. Unfortunately for me, that box is pretty orange at 9am. That means I have about a 24% chance of even getting the opportunity to purchase. If I do get lucky and it hasn’t sold out, I can expect the earliest available return time to be 7:45 pm. Ouch.
Individual Lightning Lane Availability
I’m putting all three tables together here so that you can do easy comparisons across different crowd levels. And since there are only four attractions eligible for ILL, and you might book them at different parks in the same day, we’re mashing them all together in one big happy (expensive) family.
- The first thing that jumps out at me here is that ILL availability is trending down, in aggregate. In our last update, most ILLs were available for purchase after park opening at almost all crowd levels, and sometimes for most of the day. No longer! You may be out of luck for purchasing Individual Lightning Lanes for any attraction if you’re staying offsite on high crowd days.
- Rise of the Resistance used to be the clear winner of the popularity contest here, and that doesn’t hold true anymore either. At all crowd levels, Flight of Passage sells out first. And Cosmic Rewind has worse availability than Rise of the Resistance on low and medium crowd days too.
- We also see many more availability “drops” throughout the day for Individual Lightning Lane attractions that we do for Genie+ attractions. For example, at Flight of Passage on medium crowd days, ILL reservations are always sold out at 2 pm. But then at 3 pm, more afternoon availability is often released. That means if you miss out on the initial reservations, you can keep an eye on the app later in the day and likely still pick up reservations.
Individual Lightning Lane Wait Time Savings
Individual Lightning Lane Time Savings by Crowd Level from December 2022 through early March 2023
The numbers in the table above represent the average difference between a Lightning Lane wait and a standby wait (or virtual queue wait) at each attraction if two people were to enter the queues at the exact same time. It’s calculated based on wait times submitted at nearly the same time, or with the equivalent estimated time at the time of entering line if there is no nearby timed standby wait for the timed Lightning Lane wait. Morning times are from before 11 am, peak times are between 11 am and 5 pm, and evening times are after 5 pm.
For example, let’s say that a user started timing a standby wait at 9:58 am at Rise of the Resistance. On the same day, at 10:01 am, a user starts timing a Lightning Lane wait at the same attraction. The ILL user ends up waiting 16 minutes, and the standby user ends up waiting 104 minutes. That means the ILL user “saved” 88 minutes.
- The good news is that even though availability is worse compared to our last update, the time savings compared to the last update are quite a bit higher. In fact, at all attractions time savings are up by at least 20 minutes on average – other than Cosmic Rewind where they’re up something more like 10 minutes on average.
- In the past we often used an hour of time savings as the break-even point for purchasing an Individual Lightning Lane, and now Flight of Passage and Rise of the Resistance pretty easily pass that mark under almost any conditions. You’ll have a harder time getting over that bar at Magic Kingdom, and it’s virtually impossible to save an hour right now at Cosmic Rewind.
- Cosmic Rewind is an anomaly. Virtual queue wait times are spiky, but generally somewhere around the 40-55 minute range in the middle of the day. Individual Lightning Lane wait times, though … aren’t much better. You can save something like 20 or 30 minutes by purchasing ILL for Cosmic Rewind, but really you’re purchasing a guaranteed chance to ride if you miss the windows for obtaining boarding groups.
Individual Lightning Lane Cost Per Minute
The numbers in the table above represent the amount of money that you will pay to skip one hour of standby wait at each ILL attraction. Because we know the price of each ILL each day, and we know the time savings, we can calculate the cost of each hour of time saved and then average them all out. So on any day, you can spend approximately $42 per hour to skip the virtual queue at Cosmic Rewind (this is unchanged from our last update) , or you can pay $11 per hour to skip the standby at Flight of Passage instead. Very different value propositions.
- Once again, by time saved, Cosmic Rewind is the worst value Individual Lightning Lane. This isn’t surprising since you’re paying not only for a little bit of time savings, but also for the opportunity to not try to get a boarding group.
- It’s not very surprising that Flight of Passage is frequently the best value out of all ILL options. It saves the most time, and isn’t the most expensive. If you’re going to try one Individual Lightning Lane, it’s a good option to see if you find it to be worth it for your party.
- The second-best use of your money is to bypass Seven Dwarfs Mine Train. It doesn’t save remarkable amounts of time, but it’s also the cheapest reservation to purchase on any given day.
What Does This Mean For You?
- Everything is a trade-off. ILLs for Flight of Passage and Seven Dwarfs Mine Train are statistically good values for the time you save. But you don’t save tons of time at Mine Train. So you could choose to rope drop it and save money, but then you’re not rope dropping other wait-heavy Genie+ attractions at the same park.
- ILL for Rise of the Resistance used to always save you the most time compared to standby. But its standby wait times haven’t been as awful as the past, and its reliability issues have been (knock on all of the wood) getting better.
- Only purchase Individual Lightning Lane for Cosmic Rewind if you want to ride more than once in the day, or you don’t want to deal with the hassle of getting a boarding group and waiting for it to be called.
Have you purchased any Individual Lightning Lanes at Walt Disney World? What was your experience, and do you think it was “worth it” in hindsight? Are you budgeting for Genie+ or ILL for a future WDW vacation? And did any of these results surprise you? Let me know in the comments!
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Hi! All this info is so appreciated! Any idea of approx when ILL sells out in high crowd days for Cosmic Rewind and Tron? We are staying off property and going mid-March. Trying to gauge if I will have any chance of purchasing it for either of those rides.
Thanks so much!!!
We got a boarding group for Cosmic Rewind but I actually wish that I had paid for an ILL. The wait was over an hour, and I was not expecting that based on Tron which was the other virtual queue we did which was a walk-on queue. The Cosmic Rewind ‘lightning lane’ was also backed up and long, with more people arriving all the time, but they of course still got to go first. Rise had 10 minute wait times near the end of the evening tonight, and didn’t really go above 40 mins all day. For this week at the parks, I’m definitely buying ILL for CR only
What’s been clear to me from the start of the Genie+/ILL abomination is that ILL is a breathtaking money grab even by Disney standards. You have to pay Disney to stay on-site if you hope to have a chance at the privilege of paying for what used to be a free-to-any-guest FastPass+. Pay a far more reasonable rate for an off-site accommodation and you have little chance of paying for an ILL at some laughably inconvenient time slot.
Question – for the ILLs do you get to select a return time? For example, if I am purchasing at 7am sharp for Cosmic Rewind can I select a later time like 6pm as I plan to HOP to Epcot for dinner that evening. Or do they just provide you the first available time?
Yes, you can select your favorite time from all still available.
It’s been a year. Hoping to see an update to this post soon!
Thanks for doing the math, especially for the value and time saved ratio. One info that I don’t find in this article is how much cost the various ILLs. I know that Rise of the Resistance is always 15$ per person. But what are the prices of the other three?
The kid photos in this post are next level. A+++
We did offsite in August 2018 and 2022. With FP+, we had no hope of getting Seven Dwarfs or Flight of Passage, so we had to do the rope drop stampede. Now we can’t do rope drop, but we can get LL+. So certainly worth the money to be guaranteed a ride without fighting crowds, especially with kids.
Any chance we could get an update on this soon? Love all your stuff Becky, thanks!
Thanks for this chart!!!
The next time you update the chart, could you change the color of the times. They appear to be in a gray color. Could you change them to Black? This would make them stand out much better when reading it and especially when printing it.
Speaking about updating, could you revisit the chart and see if anything has changed?
Thanks….
Updates scheduled for next weekend 🙂 And thanks for the color feedback!
Oops. Just saw this after I made my request. Excellent!
Thank you for switching the font color of the times. It is much easier to read now. Thank you for the update too…
Love these posts Becky, very informative and helpful! One question – for the purpose of these posts (ability to book ILL or G+ LL at 7) do Good Neighbor Hotels (ones with access to early morning entry) get included with on-property or off-property?
Good question, Kevin! Everyone (on and off property) can make their first G+ selection at 7 am. So nothing to worry about there. However, for ILL purchases, you have to be at a Disney property (the normal crew, plus Swan/Dolphin/Shades of Green) in order to book at 7 am. Anywhere else (including good neighbor hotels) will have to wait until the park opens.
Thank you!
Very interesting indeed. I am going this weekend and it appears it will VERY crowded. I booked a cheap hotel off site but considering getting one night a a WDW Hotel just to use the early entry and ILL early. We need to go on Frozen and Remy not sure of its worth it but spending all day in line sounds horrible!
On this site’s drop-down menu for Walt Disney World, there still lives a link for FastPass+. Maybe all of these articles on the data involving Genie+ and ILL efficiencies could be corralled there, and repurpose a link for a feature WDW hasn’t had for quite some time.
Do you have data on the breakdown of Genie+ rides and which ones run out fastest as well?
Nevermind… found part 2!!! I love data!!!
I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE these geeky, data-heavy posts. Keep sharing them with us.
we are going to WDW in March and I have been trying to decide if I’m willing to purchase ILL. This definitely helps the decision-making.
Thank you for your analyses! I love these articles. I’m assuming that Tron will eventually replace Space Mountain and Guardians of the Galaxy will eventually replace Frozen, possibly sooner than Tron. It’s clear that from Disney’s perspective AK doesn’t have two big ticket attractions that people are willing to pay for, especially now that Everest is closed for a 3 month refurbishment. Do you think they’ll make a different attraction like The safari an premium ILL ride or will they remain content with the supplemental revenue from only one attraction in that park? Clearly AK should be next in line for a new ride – maybe something to replace Twirl and Hurl? l
I am planning to visit WDW for the first time and our party has a DAS. So with DAS is ILL really not necessary anymore or it is still a good idea to spend on ILL for Rise and/or Remy?
Unfortunately, Jason, I am not a DAS expert. I know you _can_ use both, but I would say that if you can use your two DAS advance selections on ILL attractions, then that alleviates the need to pay for them. Unless you want to do them twice in a day.
Thanks Becky for the reply. I just found out that you cannot book Advance DAS for ILL attractions. WDW have a list of attractions that you can book but I don’t see those ILL attractions in there.
Back when the G+ system was first announced, I recall someone opining that if you can save an hour of time waiting in line, the Genie+ was “worth it”. That works out to about $0.27/minute. So, by that metric almost any ILL is “worth it”.
Definitely changes my calculus a bit. Though, I note that your last table has no error bars. I imagine that having two (only slightly dependent) variables make the result swing a fair amount.
It was me, I opined that. Strictly from a cost point of view, assuming that the average price a person is paying just to physically be in a park is $15/hour. But obviously that varies wildly. It’s not something I would actually use as a cutoff. But it was something.
And yes, none of the tables have error bars. Hard to make error bars look appealing in a table 😉 Eventually I’ll want to make sure that we’re capturing all of the variation – time of day, day of week, crowd level, etc – but it’s just too much data to stuff all in one post, so this gets you pretty close.
With the longest time savings making the third best cost per minute, I’m not sure that is a valid statistic. I don’t think every minute in line feels the same. The first minute in line certainly does not feel the same as the 60th minute.
I have no idea how “wait time feeling” could be quantified, but if there’s a way, I’m sure Becky will figure it out!
I suspect that it is an artifact of ILL for Space Mountain not being as popular. With out high utilization, the price stays low. 7DMT might be affected by this dynamic if the operations-critters* constrain the differential in ILL price.
*as an aside, I usually imagine the behind the scenes cast members as anthropomorphized animals from the respective IP.
But interestingly, there isn’t really an artifact since Disney hasn’t altered _any_ of the ILL prices, other than the normal weekday/weekend changes. Rise is $15 always, and always sells out almost immediately. So the …. operations-droids (did I do it right?) haven’t tinkered with it in the place where it would make most sense to tinker with it.
I thought about writing about that exact things in the commentary here, TwoBits! But then decided there were already too many words 🙂 But you’re right – increasing “feel” of return on wait savings is totally a thing. But I am thus far unsure of how to quantify it.
We could do something like bring in satisfaction scores and say well, you’re paying $xx per “point” of satisfaction or something … but then, yikes, lots of inferences being made.
While I think this analysis, although counter-intuitive, is spot on, I think you make an excellent point; and one of the only flaws with the Touring Plan system to me. Touring Plans is designed to optimize your overall waiting in lines- ie the commutative wait time over the course of the day. So it might have you hit 9 rides with 5 minute waits, and then wait for an hour at the 10th ride for a cumulative wait time of 105 minutes. When I might instead enjoy a plan that has me wait 12 minutes at 10 different rides more, even though I’d be waiting 15 more minutes during the day. Not as efficient, but potentially a better experience.
If you are going to shell out for ILL, you’d rather hold your nose once and pay up for Rise and avoid 80 minutes than pay up multiple times with smaller $s to avoid shorter waits.
Great data. Thanks so much!! 🙂
Love to the analytics! I’m a numbers nerd and Disney need so this feeds my soul and also informs me at the same time. Brilliant analysis all!
Having analytics feed your soul is something that I can totally relate to TJ, thanks for following along!
I love, love, love these posts. I’m a person that likes to have data to back up my decisions, and these data-crunching posts give me just what I need! Thank you!
Right! Can’t go in without a plan – thanks for the feedback!