Ride Reservation Refill Rules at Disney World

As crowds increase, so does “competition” for Lightning Lanes due to more guests buying Genie+ line-skipping. Despite surge pricing that can cause the paid FastPass service to cost around $40 on busy days, demand is highest when attendance and wait times are at their worst. (Updated May 28, 2024.)

Accordingly, you need advanced-level Genie strategy to score the most ride reservations, especially during the busiest dates when Genie+ is most expensive and lines are longest. There are three other advanced strategy posts you should read first for fully leveraging the Genie+ system: How the Genie+ 120 Minute Rule Works, Tips for “Stacking” Genie+ Ride Reservations, and Speed Strategy for Genie+ Selections.

None of this is explained by Walt Disney World on its official sites, and probably for good reason–these tips can be confusing and overwhelming. However, if you take ~30 minutes to learn those ins and outs, you won’t just be above average–you’ll be a top 5% Genie+ power user.

This post puts you in the top 1%, perhaps even top .5%. Before we dig into the details, a couple of warnings are in order. First, this will absolutely increase your screen time. I know that’s a major concern with a lot of Walt Disney World vacation planners, and some of our other advice avoids being glued to your phone. This does not.

Second, this is going to be confusing or intimidating at first and it will likely require several hours of your own “hands on” research before your trip. While you can comprehend the contours by reading, you really need to learn this one by doing.

If you’re so inclined, it’s worth mastering these ‘advanced’ Genie ride reservation refill rules as they will improve your day tremendously. If it were easy, everyone would do it. But it isn’t, so the vast majority of planners–even those who read this post–won’t follow the tips & tricks. Never mind the 98% of park guests who will neither read nor accidentally implement this advice. That’s okay–different strokes for different folks.

The salient point is that this is advanced-level and beyond what 99% of guests will do or even need. In other words, these are not the basics of Genie+ and Lightning Lanes at Walt Disney World–feel free to skip this without worrying that you’re missing out on something essential about the Genie+ system. This is pretty far from that.

With that preface out of the way, let’s get down to brass tacks and discuss what the heck ride reservation refill rules even are. And for that, we rewind to March 2020, in the halcyon days of FastPass+ at Walt Disney World…

There’s a reason we’re calling this “ride reservation refill rules,” and it’s not just because I’m a sucker for a good alliteration. It’s because this is nothing new, and was something Walt Disney World had been fine-tuning in the final days of FastPass+. I don’t remember precisely when they started, but it became a more pronounced practice in 2019. (Or so it seemed to me.)

Walt Disney World would add same-day FastPass+ ride reservations for headliner attractions “at random” throughout the day. Except it wasn’t really at random, it was based on a set schedule. The whole purpose of this was to throw a bone to guests who didn’t realize ride reservations were booked 30/60 days in advance, and showed up at the parks with nothing in hand.

Essentially, it was an attempt to remedy guest complaints about FastPass+ from first-timers. Except, like all things, the predictable process was reverse-engineered and it was better exploited by the savviest planners than ill-prepared newbies.

Almost identical ride reservation refill rules were built into the Genie+ and Individual Lightning Lane systems. I’ve mentioned these in passing in a variety of posts, and even explained this in our ~4,500 word Guide to Genie+ at Walt Disney World & Lightning Lane FAQ.

However, I’ve never really elaborated on it. In part that’s because I don’t want to ruin a good thing, and in part because it’s complicated, not easy to follow, and subject to change. (The latter should cancel out the former, to some degree.) Here’s everything else you need to know about ride reservation refill rules…

Refills vs. Cancellations – It should go without saying, but these are not the same. If one party cancels a ride reservation, that single reservation returns to the system along with its exact time slot. There are a lot of guests all using Genie+ at the same time.

Let’s say that 9 different parties all see and attempt to book one reservation for Slinky Dog Dash. Obviously, only one can–and that happens in milliseconds, before Disney’s systems can reflect that it’s gone to everyone else. Making matters worse, all can initiate the booking process and it will disappear out from under 8 of you.

Cancellations can become easier to identify over time because they will be for some random time. Once that’s booked, the return time clock jumps back to wherever it was in its cycle before (or goes unavailable, as the case may be). By contrast, reservation refills restart the clock and advance incrementally over the course of a few minutes (sometimes less, sometimes more) before booking up.

Party Size Does Not Matter – This is really only a tangential point, but it’s something that comes up a lot, and relates to the first point of confusion. If you see a cancellation, but are one of the disappointed parties that were too slow to book it, there might be the assumption that it’s because your party was too large. Truthfully, I don’t know whether that’s the case with cancellations–if it shows for everyone despite not being a fit. Nothing would surprise me, but I do know that even as a party of 1, I am routinely have the cancelled reservation rug pulled out from under me.

What I also know is that party size doesn’t matter with ride reservation refills. Lightning Lanes are not like Advance Dining Reservations–Walt Disney World is not trying to match attraction vehicle seating with hourly capacity. That’s not even remotely feasible. It’s a pure numbers game: X number of ride reservations are released, and that number can be booked in any permutation possible.

Always Modify – Thankfully, there is now a modify feature in Genie+ and you should always use it. That’s for two reasons, the first being that booking the original Lightning Lane starts the clock on the 120 minute rule, and modifying does not reset it. By contrast, cancelling and rebooking does. Similarly, waiting for the “perfect” Lightning Lane means you’re on the clock.

Second, modifying is a hedge. If something better does not come along, or if someone swoops it out from under you, at least you still have the original Lightning Lane. That makes playing the Lightning Lane lottery risk-free! Book immediately, and modify when something better comes up.

Refresh Aggressively – It’s always better to force refresh Genie rather than to wait for it to do so on its own. There are several ways to do this, but I prefer the pin and pull-down method described in Speed Strategy for Genie+ at Walt Disney World.

Booking reservation refills isn’t really about speed (this is arguably an antidote to the 7 am mad rush, as explained below), but the same principle applies.

Refills Bring Stability – During the aforementioned 7 am mad dash, the clock is advancing on Lightning Lane return times very fast. This is precisely why Disney started “hiding” the times for the first half hour–because they were often hours later than what you’d see earlier in the booking process. This one results from a surge of people all trying to book the same ride reservation right at 7:00:00 am.

If you wait and do one of these ride reservation refills–especially the first one of the morning–the times are transparent and more stable.

Refilled Ride Roster – Now we’re getting down to business. Here are the attractions that we’ve seen get reservation refills at one point or another:

• Magic Kingdom: Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Jungle Cruise, Haunted Mansion, Peter Pan’s Flight, Pirates of the Caribbean, Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, Space Mountain, Splash Mountain
• Epcot: Frozen Ever After, Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, Soarin’ Around the World, Test Track
• Hollywood Studios: Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway, Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run, Slinky Dog Dash, Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, Toy Story Mania, Twilight Zone Tower of Terror
• Animal Kingdom: Avatar Flight of Passage, Kilimanjaro Safaris, Na’vi River Journey

Do These Ride Reservation Refills Always Happen? – Nope. Some attractions have their Lightning Lane availability replenished like clockwork at set times every day, others happen on rare occasion, and most are somewhere in between the two extremes.

Again, this is another reason to set aside a morning before your trip (ideally as close to your travel dates as possible) and do a dry run. You don’t have to pay for Genie+ to see the refills (in my many mornings of researching for this article, I didn’t) and it’ll give you an idea of what’s happening currently. I could share a bunch of refill times here today, and they could be wrong tomorrow, next week or month.

What Are Those Potentially Wrong Genie+ Ride Reservation Refill Times? – I want to, once again, stress that there are no guarantees. (There’s a reason I’m “backloading” key details like times towards the end of the article–I want anyone who simply wants a quick and easy hack to have given up and closed the browser tab by now.)

Moreover, I’ve stopped actively testing Lightning Lane strategy. There was a time when I was buying and using Genie+ at least once per week at Walt Disney World, as we worked to put together our resources. However, as the paid FastPass service has become more stable, the need for further testing has decreased. And we’d rather not waste money, so we largely stopped. (Don’t worry, we’ll be back at it once pre-arrival Lightning Lanes launch!)

The good news is that the folks over at Thrill-Data track what they call Lightning Lane “popup releases” (same kinda thing, different name). The list of attractions appears incomplete to me, but it should give you an idea of when to expect ride reservation refills or popup releases.

With that said, it’s worth pointing out that their data is automated–meaning an actual human isn’t reviewing the app and making notes of what’s being refilled. That means they could miss refills that appear and vanish quickly.

In the past, I had found that the first Genie+ Lightning Lane refill typically occurs before 7:30 am. It’s not always at a specific time, so I’d recommend starting to refresh around 7:05 am and (potentially) continuing until 7:25 am. That’s right–you could be spending the first half-hour of your morning obsessively refreshing the My Disney Experience app. I hope you’ve had your coffee.

After that, Genie+ Lightning Lane refills tend to occur throughout the day, often in the mid-afternoon. Actual ride reservation refill times vary by day, park, crowd levels, and attraction downtime. With that said, I’ve never seen any refills in the 8 am hour or after the 3 pm hour.

Where Does This Matter Most? – There’s a good chance this will be overwhelming or too much work if you are the type of person who goes on vacation to, ya know, vacation. If you want to spend time gazing at your family’s smiles and enjoying time with them at Walt Disney World and not glued to your phone, we would recommend only embracing this approach in one park and being more laid back with the rest.

Without question, that park is Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Distilling all of this down to its key components, you could (theoretically) sleep until 7:06 am, then book Slinky Dog Dash for an early return time during its first drop, followed by Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance during its first refill. Unlike the 7:00:00 am mad dash, this would not require two adults and would thus be easier since these times are staggered (for now, at least).

It’s also important at EPCOT, especially if you want the trifecta of Test Track, Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, and Frozen Ever After via the Genie+ service. Without taking advantage of ride reservation refills, it’s almost impossible to book Lightning Lanes for all three. That is, unless it’s a slow day…in which case, you might be better off without buying Genie+ in the first place. (Seriously–it requires a lot of backtracking at EPCOT, and you can waste more time doing that than standby lines!)

As yet another reminder, Genie+ is not the end-all, be-all of park touring strategy. Our Genie+ v. Savvy Standby Strategy at Walt Disney World covers the best and worst ways to beat the crowds right now and Genie+ and Lightning Lanes are not the best (and certainly not the easiest) way in 3 of the 4 parks.

The only park where Genie+ was the clear-cut winner was Magic Kingdom. Everywhere else, there were superior strategies for saving time waiting in line. Following these ride reservation refill rules and accompanying strategy bridges the gap, and makes Genie+ more viable for DHS, as well.

If you’re overwhelmed by all of the recent changes, crowd reports, and everything else, the aforementioned post is the most succinct resource for current strategy. (Seriously, if you only read ONE strategy post prior to your trip, make it that. The advice there is definitely more practical than this post for most.)

Ultimately, a lot of you will likely leave this post even more confused or frustrated, and perhaps further infuriated that Genie+ and Lightning Lanes are so unnecessarily complicated. In general, we agree with that sentiment. However, in this specific case, that doesn’t really apply. This isn’t really a loophole exploit, but there is a reason why Disney doesn’t publish this info itself. These ride reservation refills are not meant to be understood or common knowledge–they’re supposed to be a ‘relief valve’ of sorts for guests who don’t know all of the ins and outs, and are just randomly looking for availability. That’s true with a lot of Genie+ hacks–it’s leveraging the system in a way that wasn’t intended.

This is also why we’ve included so many caveats throughout this post about all of this being subject to change, inconsistent, and so forth. Walt Disney World will toy with these times to keep power users on their toes, meaning there are no guarantees. Thankfully, at least now you have the safety net of a modify button. Sleeping in and hoping for refills is still a perilous approach, but to quote the great Indiana Jones (Adventure): “Real Rewards Await Those Who Choose Wisely.”

Planning a Walt Disney World trip? Learn about hotels on our Walt Disney World Hotels Reviews page. For where to eat, read our Walt Disney World Restaurant Reviews. To save money on tickets or determine which type to buy, read our Tips for Saving Money on Walt Disney World Tickets post. Our What to Pack for Disney Trips post takes a unique look at clever items to take. For what to do and when to do it, our Walt Disney World Ride Guides will help. For comprehensive advice, the best place to start is our Walt Disney World Trip Planning Guide for everything you need to know!

YOUR THOUGHTS

Do these ride reservation refill rules make sense to you or is it too overwhelming? Will you use this strategy for scoring Genie+ or Individual Lightning Lane selections? Have you had success in getting Slinky Dog Dash during one of these refills? What about headliners in other parks? Thoughts on leveraging Genie+ refills versus other strategy? Do you agree or disagree with my assessment? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!