We don’t have to tell you that just about everything in the life of an American consumer seems to be degrading in quality, from useless AI chatbots replacing the assistance of live humans to commercials being added to streaming services that were sold to customers as ad-free.
At Disney parks, the latest degradation has come upon us slowly, and vacationers are like the proverbial frog in the pot water that is gradually heated to boiling.
You have probably heard complaints about the way Disney’s American parks have been operating since the pandemic. Many of those complaints have centered on Lightning Lane. That’s the “quicker” line for most attractions that can be accessed for an extra daily fee as long as a visitor preschedules ride visits using a special app.
That special line used to be offered for free as FastPass to all guests as part of the storied “Disney difference.” But in 2021, the feature was converted to a paid upcharge, and the story just got worse from there.
Frommer’s has covered the many messy chapters in the bumbling saga of Lightning Lane, from its widely panned rollout as Genie+ to the difficulties of its cumbersome app. By 2023, Disney had allowed Lightning Lane to become so oversubscribed that the unpaid lines were slowed to a crawl, and, as a result, most guests to Disney’s parks felt they had no choice but to cough up the extra $15 to $39 per person, per day, for Multi Pass just to have a tolerable experience.
It was the underlying catch-22—the unpaid lines would actually go much faster if the paid Lightning Lanes weren’t so overstuffed—that led Frommer’s to dub paid Lightning Lane a “scam” in February 2024.
Lightning Lane Premier Pass: An answer to a scam?
Last fall, undoubtedly aware of the public drubbing it was getting, Disney Parks announced an additional form of the Lightning Lane pass. This new product, Lightning Lane Premier Pass, allows use of all the Lightning Lanes once a day, but unlike the core Multi Pass product that the vast majority of guests buy, holders of the Premier Pass don’t have to schedule appointments. They can join a Lighting Lane line whenever they want.
That tweak is a classic case of a company creating a problem and then exploiting that self-created drawback as a new income stream. Travelers experience a similar money-sapping phenomenon every day when the U.S. airlines charge extra to lift passengers out of the miseries of economy-class seats that the airlines themselves made miserable.
The appointment-free Premier Pass liberates guests from endless in-park scrolling on Disney’s awkward app, so the pass comes with an extreme price tag. Instead of the $13 to $39 charged for the version that requires scheduling, Premier Pass costs between $119 and $449 per person, depending on the park and the day. At its highest price, Premier Pass pulls in as much cash as more than 11 individual purchases of the lower-tier Multi Pass.
First, Disney ran Premier Pass as a limited test with a capped number of passes sold daily. But the product hasn’t gone away since then, and over the past few months, Disney appears to be expanding the availability of the Premier Pass—and guests have an appetite for it.
We don’t know the total number of Premier Passes sold (Disney doesn’t release that information), but it’s clear the product is gathering steam. Premier Pass has sold out at all four Florida theme parks on several days in 2025 already.
The future of Premier Pass
Soon, Disney will face a choice. Will the company continue to offer Premier Pass alongside the oversubscribed Multi Pass, or will it make a change?
Disney’s plan might be to increase Premier Pass availability to the point where the company can afford to safely discontinue its lower-tier Multi Pass product. That would make Lightning Lane unaffordable for the majority of guests, kicking them back to the slower, unpaid line—but, in the end, having far fewer people in the Lightning Lanes would make the standard lines move much faster.
There will be some loud protests from some Disney regulars who find themselves priced out of the short line. It’s never a savvy move to tell your most devoted customers they don’t rate anymore. But in the long run the move could help triage some of the most horrific guest reviews about unpleasant park experiences.
It’s worth noting that if Disney does opt to do away with the Multi Pass, the parks will essentially be arriving at the same system that rival Universal has had in place for many years with its own Express Pass. That, too, is a high-value line-cutting privilege that costs hundreds of dollars (about $90 to $400 a day), naturally limiting the number of people who have the pass, which in turn frees up space in the paid lines.
So that outcome could be considered a hilarious self-own for Disney, which would have needlessly subjected itself to years of reputation-soiling ridicule over the mishandling of Genie+ / Lightning Lane when the company could have simply copied Universal’s system to begin with. With the billion-dollar Universal Epic Universe weeks away from its grand opening elsewhere in Orlando, this is not a great moment for Disney to look like it’s merely following Universal’s more intelligent lead.
But if Disney doesn’t make Premier Pass its dominant Lightning Lane product, then the overcrowded lines and the public discontentment will continue. The company will make even more money off its “quicker” line system, guest experience be damned.
A watershed moment approaches. Will Disney choose guest experience over the bottom line? The future path will tell us a lot about what Disney has become in this new era.
Jason Cochran is the author of the award-winning Frommer’s Disney World, Universal & Orlando guidebook.