Niles: Disney squeezes fans again with new Lightning Lane option

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 Premier Pass gets one-time access to each Lightning Lane at Disneyland and Disney California Adventure for the day. There’s no need to book returns 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), Lightning Lane Premier Pass is 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 less than 10% of what Disneyland is charging for the new Premier Pass, thousands of people buy Disney’s Lightning Lane Multi Pass 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 why many fans have complained that Lightning Lane Multi Pass serves as a stealth price increase — an extra $30-plus per person per day that visitors must pay to get a comparable experience to the days 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 Lightning Lane Multi Pass with the new Premier Pass product, 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 all the rest of us could go save a little money and enjoy shorter standby queues.

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