How to use Lightning Lane at Disneyland
Want to skip the lines at Disneyland? The old, free Fastpass system is gone, but Disney has replaced it with a system called Lightning Lane. Here is my updated advice on how to use this system at Disneyland in California. If you are looking for help with a Walt Disney World visit in Florida, please see my previous article, How to use Lightning Lane at Walt Disney World.
There is no free option for Lightning Lane. Disney sells three types of Lightning Lane access that guests can buy when they visit Disneyland or Disney California Adventure. Based on my experience, and the experience of other Theme Park Insider readers, here are the best ways to get the most from Disney’s Lightning Lane system.
What is a Lightning Lane?
A Lightning Lane is just the old Fastpass queue, with a new name. It’s a way to bypass the regular standby queue on popular Disneyland Resort attractions. There will be some wait, given the large number of people who buy Lightning Lane access each day. But attractions operators are trained to prefer the Lightning Lane queue to keep its wait time much shorter than the standby queue.
Sometimes people visiting Disney get confused because “Lightning Lane” can mean two things.
1) It’s the name of the physical queue that people use to access an attraction, and
2) It’s the name of the upcharge pass that people have to buy to use that queue.
So which Lightning Lane package should you buy, if any? Let’s look at the options.
Lightning Lane Premier Pass
The most expensive version of Lightning Lane is Lightning Lane Premier Pass. But if you can afford it, this is the pass to buy. A Premier Pass gets you one-time access to the Lightning Lane at each of attractions that offer it at both Disneyland and Disney California Adventure. This is different from the way that Premier Pass works at Disney World in Florida, where Disney sells the passes for use in one park at a time.
To get the most value from a Premier Pass, you should have a Park Hopper ticket so that you can use it in both parks on your day. You can use Premier Pass to access the attractions listed in the Single Pass and Multi Pass sections below.
You can use the Premier Pass whenever you want, so there’s no need to plan any return times in advance. Prices range from $300-450 a day. You can buy a Lightning Lane Premier Pass up to seven days in advance of your visit, starting at 7am Pacific Time, via the official Disneyland app.
Lightning Lane Single Pass
The most popular attraction at each park offers Lightning Lane Single Pass. This is a one-time access to the Lightning Lane at a specific attraction. When you buy the pass, you will select an arrival window to use the pass and ride the ride. Prices will vary by date and by attraction, and you can buy one Lighting Lane Single Pass for each attraction each day. Lighting Lane Single Pass is available via the official Disneyland app as soon as you enter the park.
Here are the attractions that offer Lightning Lane Single Pass and their recent price ranges:
Star Wars Rise of the Resistance: $29-35
Radiator Springs Racers: $18-25
Lightning Lane Multi Pass
A Lightning Lane Multi Pass allows you one-time access to Disney’s other Lightning Lane attractions. Again, the pass is good for rides at both theme parks and its price varies by date. Prices have ranged from $37-40 per person per day so far this year. You can buy a Lightning Lane via the app or as an add-on when you purchase your Disneyland tickets. Shop our partner's Disneyland Resort tickets page for options.
Here the eligible attractions at each park:
Disneyland
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
Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin
Space Mountain
Star Tours – The Adventures Continue
Tiana's Bayou Adventure
Disney California Adventure
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
Soarin' Over California
Toy Story Midway Mania
Web Slingers: A Spider-Man Adventure
Using a Multi Pass well requires planning. Unlike at Walt Disney World in Florida, there is no advance booking for Lightning Lane return times at Disneyland in California. You can make your first return-time reservation as soon as you enter the park, using the official Disneyland app.
To save time, download and create your travel party in that app before you arrive. To get the most value from a Multi Pass, you want to try to stack as many arrival times as possible during the day.
Stacking Lightning Lanes
You want to book your first time as soon as possible after your arrival in the park. You can make another Lightning Lane reservation as soon as your first Lightning Lane arrival time hits, or two hours later, whichever comes first. That two-hour rule can be your trick to stacking multiple Lightning Lane reservations at a time. Whenever you make a Lightning Lane reservation in the park, set your phone’s time to 120 minutes if your next Lightning Lane arrival time is not within two hours. When the timer goes off, make another reservation.
Remember that you change Lightning Lane reservations after you make them, too. Keep checking throughout the day for rides that might not have been available before. New time slots can open up as people cancel reservations.
Lightning Lane Strategy
Remember that you will start the day at whichever park you have a reservation for. However, you can Park Hop immediately if you have a Park Hopper ticket.
For Disneyland, Indiana Jones and Space Mountain "sell out" fastest among the Lightning Lane attractions. Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin will remain available later in the day, but it is one of the best uses of Lightning Lane, given its long standby wait times. Matterhorn Bobsleds, Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway, and Tiana's Bayou Adventure are other popular selections that often book out for the day by late afternoon. Try to get return times for those before they are gone.
At Disney California Adventure, Incredicoaster is the toughest get, followed by Guardians of the Galaxy, Toy Story Midway Mania and Soarin'.
If all none of these paid Lightning Lane options sounds appealing to you, remember that using the standby queues is free with park admission. Visit our "What to do" visitors' guides for my advice on what to visit when to minimize your wait times without having to pay for Lightning Lane.
You can find discounts on multi-day theme park tickets, including Lightning Lane add-ons, via our partner's Disneyland Resort tickets page.
Finally, for my weekly update of Disney and theme park news, please sign up for Theme Park Insider's weekend newsletter.
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We just came back from 2 days at DCA and Disneyland, and used LLMP to optimize our visit. It definitely saved us time, but if we were not working to really maximize our use, it would have been a waste of money.
The first thing I noticed is that aside from at the very beginning of the day, we almost always were able to move LL reservations earlier in the day after initially booking them. For instance, if you grabbed a LL for TSMM at 3 PM, you could go in to modify that reservation a minute later and find availability for that same attraction at least an hour earlier. It means you're always looking at your phone and modifying your reservations, which is not much different than the old MaxPass system (and FP+ at WDW), but continuously looking to improve your reservations is usually rewarded, even on popular, top tier attractions. Note that RSR and RotR are only available through LLPP or LL-single use, so plan on either rope dropping those 2 attractions or watching wait times to see when lines drop typically in the middle of the day.
The other thing we noticed is that it pays to know what attractions experience frequent downtime or may have delayed openings. If the system allows you to book a LL for an attraction that is down when your window opens to ride, that LL automatically converts to a multi-pass that can be used for that same ride (if it comes back up) or other select attractions at any time of the day. For instance, we had booked a LL for Indy while waiting for the park to open for a return in the first hour of operation when the CM manning the rope to Adventureland stated that the attraction would have a delayed opening, and when the ride stayed down through the first hour of the day it became a flexible pass that we were able to hold until later in the afternoon. The flexibility of the replacement LL is based on the original attraction (Indy, GotG:MB, W.E.B. Slingers, Incredicoaster, and Space can be used on anything other than RotR and RSR, but lesser rides like say Buzz or Goofy's Sky School cannot be replaced with those top tier rides). Also, if you have park hoppers, you don't have to be physically in the park where you're making reservations. If you know you're going to hop from Disneyland to DCA in the mid-afternoon, and have already used most of the available LLs in DL, you can start booking LLs in DCA even before you walk through the Esplanade.
The other thing we noticed about LL last week is that it's valuable to know where the various queue merges are to determine whether getting a LL is worth it based on the posted wait time. In general, the merges are before any pre-shows, but the posted wait time typically represents the amount of time it takes to board the ride vehicle, so attractions with long pre-shows will almost always display 10-20 minute waits even if there's a very short standby line, so using a LL might not offer that much time savings. In order to optimize your use of LL, it's worth looking at current wait times before committing to a given reservation, particularly if it's within the next hour.
Finally, if you don't mind splitting your group, don't forget about the single rider lines available on certain attractions. There are even double-rider options now available on MFSR and Monsters Inc. However, know that some of these single/double rider lines bypass pre-shows and elaborately themed queues, so it's worth experiencing the attractions through the standby or LL lines first if you've never ridden before. However, bypassing pre-shows can usually mean you're riding even faster than with a LL. We found the single rider line for W.E.B. Slingers extremely helpful because it bypasses a pretty long stretch of queue after the preshow that can get you on the ride about 5-10 minutes faster than LL - we were frankly shocked there weren't more people riding this attraction through the single rider line. Space Mountain and Indy have single rider lines, but both looked to be extremely popular (and difficult to gauge before committing to given the long winding corridors you need to traverse to get to the loading platforms) when we rode through LL (Indy's popularity might have been due to the lengthy downtime the attraction was experience that day), and while you could probably cut the standby wait in half, it would not be faster than LL.
A last bit of advise, if you really want to optimize your use of LLMP, make sure your phone is fully charged and you have access to a backup charger. The Disneyland App uses GPS, so it can burn through power pretty quickly, and if you're constantly refreshing times and modifying LL reservations, you might not make it through the day without recharging at least once depending on your phone's battery health. Just for reference, we were able to get @10 LL reservations both days we were at the parks (attractions in both parks on both days), which is way better than what you can typically get at WDW.
Also, LLMP at Disneyland includes PHotopass, which Disneyland seems to have given up on with every on-ride photo now being given away to guests who grab the number of their shot from the display at the exit. Also, there are not nearly as many Photopass photographers at DL as there are at WDW (most roaming characters do not have Photopass), so if you want to take advantage of the LLMP Photopass perk, you need to be proactive to seek out those photographers and grab a shot when you see them (I saw many just hanging out incognito not doing anything, but as soon as we asked for a picture, a line would form).