We have been telling you about the changes hitting Disney World on January 9th for so long now, it seemed like the big day was never going to get here!
But here we are! We are in Disney World today, January 9th! We’re checking out all the new “rules” that have hit the parks. As of today, the Disney Dining Plan and all-day park hopping have returned as well as the removal of park pass reservations for date-based tickets. This change to park pass reservations has also had some domino effect changes and updates, particularly how we use virtual queues. We logged into our Disney World app today to see just how the virtual queue update will affect you on your next trip.
If you have any specific questions about virtual queues or any other planning topics, we recommend our friends at Mouse Fan Travel. They’re experts in the field with over 20 years of vacation planning experience, and they can help take a bunch of the stress out of the entire booking process for you!
Virtual queues are useful lines that you can enter using the Disney World app. They are commonly used for new rides that have high demand, and they make it so you don’t have to stand in a physical line for hours. Instead, you can join the virtual queue and continue exploring the parks until your boarding group is called.
Currently, two attractions in Disney World use virtual queues — TRON Lightcycle / Run and Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind. There are two virtual queue drops during the day, one at 7AM and another at 1PM. It’s during these two times that you can hop into the app and select to enter the queue.
Up until now, you could only pick one of the rides at the 7AM drop based on the park you had a reservation for — so if you had a reservation for Magic Kingdom, you could only select TRON at 7AM. But that has now changed!
Since you no longer need a park reservation for date-based tickets, you can select either of the rides at the 7AM drop, and you don’t have to be inside the parks. However, you will need to be in the park for the ride you wish you pick at the 1PM drop — if you want to join the Cosmic Rewind virtual queue at 1PM, you’ll need to be in EPCOT by 1PM (which is easy now thanks to all-day park hopping!)
We logged on at 7AM to check this out! We wanted to know if this process would be simple or more complicated as now more people had access to them both at the same time (perhaps resulting in them selling out faster). Here’s what we learned!
We didn’t have any trouble getting virtual queues for TRON or for Guardians of the Galaxy this morning! We tried right at 7AM and got in for both. (Note that this was two separate members of our team — you can’t hold two virtual queues at the same time!)
As we said earlier, we were afraid that it could become harder to get a virtual queue today, because most Disney World visitors won’t need a Park Pass Reservation for a particular park to get one. That wasn’t our experience this morning. The TRON 7AM virtual queue sold out around 7:30 this morning, and the Guardians of the Galaxy virtual queue remained available until shortly after 8AM.
Now we would note that it’s a Tuesday in January, during a non-holiday, non-school break week. We don’t expect it to be a busy day for crowds at Disney World. Your experience could vary if you are here at a busier time, but this is what we saw this morning!
Even with this update, you will still be given a time frame to report to your ride. Usually, we see this being an hour window, however, that had also changed in EPCOT the other day! So be sure to pay attention to the times when your boarding group is called so you don’t miss out on your ride.
We’re so happy to see this change! It makes your trip a little simpler and you have more options available, which is great now that park reservations and park hopping have both changed. It’s an exciting day today as all of these changes have taken effect!
For more Disney news, keep following AllEars!
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We were just at Disney March 15 and 16. As stated, many spring breaks going on and parks were crowded. As far as virtual que, our experience was very different from this article. We set an alarm at 6:59 am on our phone and my husband and I both had the virtual que screen ready in our app. You keep hitting refresh, and right at 7 am a blue button appears that says “join virtual que”. we would both click this button as quickly as possible and both days we got a message that no more passes were available. That’s right. They were GONE in less than 3 seconds at 7 am on the nose. We would set an alarm for 12:59 pm and do the same thing at 1 pm from inside the park. While we we were able to get into the que both days, with us both frantically pushing the button as quickly as possible. even though we clicked the button at as close to 1 pm as possible, our group for Tron and our group for Guardians each ended up being just before Park closure and we had to decide between the ride and fireworks. All this to say is that the virtual Que system needs some work. We only had a short physical weight on Tron but Guardians took us an hour and a half to get through the physical line, I think due to Lightning Lanes cutting in front. Both rides are great and recommended so if you can get in line through the app, do it. Also, if both members of your party are trying to get in the cue, others will get an error message once someone from the party gets in successfully.
There is nothing useful about a virtual cue, it is unnecessary. Your lucky if you get one , if not you don’t ride the ride. It doesn’t need a virtual cue at all if you do the math correctly.