LIVE UPDATES: We’re Testing the BRAND NEW Lightning Lane Premier Pass at Disneyland!

The day has finally come! Lightning Lane Premier Pass has debuted at the Disneyland Resort.

Disneyland

Starting today, October 23rd, Lightning Lane Premier Pass is available in limited quantities, but we were able to snag one! This new service is a third version of Disneyland’s pay-to-skip-the-line service, which is different from Lightning Lane Multi and Single Pass. Premier Pass allows you to access every Lightning Lane between Disneyland and Disney California Adventure once, including Lightning Lane Single Pass attractions! You do not need to make a selection; you can just show up at the attraction and ride at your convenience. We are live and testing it out, so follow along!

As of right now, Lightning Lane Premier Pass is priced at $400 per person, per day for park visits through December 31st, 2024. Beginning in 2025, pricing will vary by date and demand within a $300 to $400 range.

©Disney

While it is a pretty penny, this new service can allow you to ensure you ride all the popular rides with a lower wait time. You also have the flexibility to create your schedule without having to worry about selecting a return time.

Space Mountain Lightning Lane in Disneyland

In Disneyland, the following rides are included:

- Autopia
- Big Thunder Mountain Railroad
- Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters
- Haunted Mansion*
- Indiana Jones Adventure
- “it’s a small world”
- Matterhorn Bobsleds
- Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway
- Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run
- Pirates of the Caribbean**
- Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin
- Space Mountain
- Star Tours – The Adventures Continue
- Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance

*At this time, Haunted Mansion Holiday is only available via a virtual queue, as enhancements are being added to the queue area. You will need to use the Disneyland app to request to enter this attraction. Plans are in the works to offer Haunted Mansion Holiday as a Lightning Lane Premier Pass attraction.

**Pirates of the Caribbean is temporarily available as a Lightning Lane attraction.

Star Tours Lightning Lane

In Disney California Adventure Premier Pass includes access to:

- Goofy’s Sky School
- Grizzly River Run
- Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: BREAKOUT!
- Incredicoaster
- The Little Mermaid – Ariel’s Undersea Adventure
- Monsters, Inc. Mike & Sulley to the Rescue!
- Radiator Springs Racers
- Soarin’ Around the World
- Toy Story Midway Mania!
- WEB SLINGERS: A Spider-Man Adventure

California Adventure

Today is the first official day of this new service at Disneyland, and here is how it is going so far!

We started our day by purchasing Lightning Lane Premier Pass. The process was pretty straightforward. Once you’ve completed your purchase, you get a scannable ticket in the app.

Okay, let’s ride some rides! You’ll be able to redeem the ticket by clicking on “Redeem” on the home page of the app.

The app will give you the full list of rides with which you can use Premier Pass. It’s basically any ride with a Lightning Lane.

We headed straight over to Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge to try out the pass. So we decided to go for a ride on Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run first. We scanned into the ride like we would with regular Lightning Lane. Everything is pretty much the same; there aren’t any new sounds when you scan in, and you don’t get front-of-line priority. So far, the only real difference between Premier Pass and Lightning Lane Multi Pass and Single Pass is that you don’t have to book specific times for Lightning Lane Premier Pass.

Anyway, it took us about 30 seconds before we were already on the ride. We even had the cockpit to ourselves! It was early when we got started, though, so the lines were already pretty short.

Once you redeem a Lightning Lane for a ride, there is a section in the Lightning Lane Premier Pass available attractions page that shows you what you’ve already used.

Then we walked over to Rise of the Resistance and redeemed our Premier Pass. We got to the beginning of the ride in just 8.5 minutes (basically, most of that time was spent just walking through the queue)! The standby line was already pretty long at the time.

We made our way over to Frontierland to ride the Wildest Ride in the Wilderness, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. We redeemed our pass and were on the ride in THREE MINUTES.

Then it was time to become a pirate with the Pirates of the Caribbean. We scanned in and our wait was a total of 4 minutes before we were on our boat.

Next up? We’re going to go on an adventure at the Indiana Jones Adventure. The posted standby wait time here was 70 minutes. We scanned in at the Lightning Lane and waited 25 minutes. This has been our longest wait so far.

We did notice that some folks were a little confused about the new system, so that slowed us down some when scanning in. We rode Star Tours next, scanned in, and waited a whole 9 minutes before we were boarding our transport.

We stayed in Tomorrowland and hopped in the Lightning Lane for Buzz Lightyear’s Astro Blasters. It took all of a minute to board the ride.

Then something happened. The attractions page wouldn’t load for us. This is the first technical issue we’ve come across, though. We’d also like to note that this only happened the one time: when we refreshed, the ride list came back up.

Then it was on to Autopia. It took us four minutes to board.

Okay, we’re starting to think we could quite literally ride EVERYTHING in Disneyland in one day with the Premier Pass. We’ll be using it more throughout the day, so check this post for updates!