3 BIG CHANGES Disney World Needs to Make Before January 9th

Did you hear all the big Disney news?!

New Annual Pass prices, price increases, and all-day park hopping were all recently announced for Disney World. Yes, you read that right, ALL-DAY PARK HOPPING is returning to Disney World! We have been waiting for this announcement since the perk was removed post-COVID and it is finally here. But now, we’re wondering if Disney is ready for this huge update.

Starting January 9th, 2024, all-day park hopping will be reintroduced to the Disney World parks. This means you’ll no longer need to wait until 2 PM to switch parks if you have a Park Hopper ticket. While we are so ready to start our day in Hollywood Studios and then run over to EPCOT for lunch, we’re pretty sure Disney is going to have to make a few changes before they’re ready for this change.

Here are three big changes we’re expecting to see ahead of all-day park hopping.

Genie+ Changes

Genie+ is the Disney service that can help tailor your day so you can experience everything you want to throughout your trip. It’s also where you can make Lightning Lane (line-pass system) selections.

Currently, you can purchase Genie+ for one park or choose the multi-park option (best if you plan on park hopping). The problem with this system is that if you buy the multi-park Genie+ option you can’t make Lightning Lane selections for another park until after 2PM.

While this makes sense with the current park hopping system where you can’t hop until after 2PM, this won’t be very useful with the all-day park hopping system.

If you park hop over to Animal Kingdom at 11AM, you’ll probably want to make a Lightning Lane selection for then, NOT for after 2PM (we could be at our third park by then!) So, this is one change we’re hoping to see from Disney in the near future.

Virtual Queue Changes

Virtual Queues have been Disney’s way of alleviating long wait times at rides by letting you join a virtual line and still enjoy other parts of the park while you wait for your boarding group to be called. This can be very convenient!

However, we’ve seen that most of the time virtual queues can only be entered two times per day, once at 7AM and again at 1PM (notice it’s before current park hopping begins).

Well, if park hopping can start happening all day, we would be pretty disappointed if we hopped to a park at 9AM and planned to be at a different park by 1PM (trust us, this happens) and couldn’t get into a virtual queue for either park.

While there hasn’t been any confirmation from Disney, we wouldn’t be surprised to see them add more times for joining virtual queues to accommodate park hopping.

Transportation Changes

Not all, but many of the parks are connected via some mode of Disney transportation. You can travel between Hollywood Studios and EPCOT by boat or Skyliner. EPCOT and Magic Kingdom can be gone between via the Monorail. Magic Kingdom and Hollywood Studios have buses that go between them. And Animal Kingdom has buses that go between it and every other park.

With the current park hopping system, we’ve noticed that there aren’t a lot of buses that run between these parks before 2PM since you can’t park hop until after that. So we’re expecting that Disney may have to up the number of buses between the parks to accommodate more people traveling between them earlier in the day.

Of course, this won’t affect the other forms of transportation since they generally run on regular schedules starting before the parks open.

We can’t wait for January 9th and all the changes it will be bringing to the parks! The return of all-day park hopping has been highly anticipated by many Disney fans. Hopefully, we’ll see these changes come along with it.

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Are you looking forward to all-day park hopping? Let us know in the comments!

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