I paid $15 per person for Disney's Genie+ service for part of my family's Disney World vacation here's how it works and when I think it's worth it

I grew up in Florida but now live with my husband and daughter in Italy, and we only get to the US once a year. I've taken our daughter to Disneyland Paris, but my husband and I had never taken her to Disney World in Florida. Since this was our big annual vacation, we decided to go all out and spend three days seeing all four Disney parks.

To try to get the most out of our time in the parks and minimize waiting in line, I decided to sign my family up for the Genie+ service on the My Disney Experience app, which is a paid service that helps to organize how you spend your time in the park and allows for shorter wait times on some rides.

Here's my take on how the service works, how much it costs, and whether I think it was worth it for my family's trip.

Introduced in October 2021, Genie+ is the paid version of Genie, which is a feature on the My Disney Experience app that helps park ticket holders plan their days by suggesting rides and attractions to see based on interests and availability.

Genie is available for free to simply provide suggestions on how to structure your day around which rides you most want to go on or around specific themes, like princesses or thrill rides, view current ride wait times and closures, and see the schedule of shows, parades, and nighttime spectaculars. You can also make restaurant reservations, including for character dining, and order and prepay for meals at eateries that offer counter service.

By paying for Genie+, not only could I access all of the other Genie features, but I could also grab Lightning Lane access for certain rides. Lightning Lanes are the express lines that allow visitors to bypass the regular, often very long lines for rides, cutting their wait times sometimes by a lot. Lightning Lanes replaced FastPasses, which for years were Disney's free, popular "cut-the-line" option.

Regular Genie users can access Lightning Lanes, but they have to pay for each individual Lightning Lane reservation. Paying Genie+ users, on the other hand, get unlimited Lightning Lane access, albeit with many caveats.

Right now, Genie+ costs between $15 and $22 per day, per person, at Disney World. Rates fluctuate depending on whether it's high or low season in the parks, and may fluctuate on a day-to-day, park-to-park basis depending on how busy a specific park is on a given day.

On the day we purchased Genie+ in September to use at Magic Kingdom, my family paid $15 per person, on top of our theme park tickets.

By using Genie+, I learned there are also certain restrictions when it comes to the "unlimited" Lightning Lane access.

During our visit, not all rides were eligible for Lightning Lane, including several hugely popular rides. When we were there, the app showed that these rides included the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, Star Wars Rise of the Resistance, Avatar Flight of Passage, and Guardians of the Galaxy Cosmic Rewind. For these, if we wanted Lightning Lane access, we would have had to pay an additional per-ride fee, called Individual Lightning Lane, which I saw on the app could be up to $22 per person, per ride.

One of the rules of Genie+ is that you can only purchase it on the day of your park reservation. So since I reserved our tickets for a Monday, I had to wait to purchase Genie+ after midnight on Monday. I linked all of our tickets to the Disney app, and purchased Genie+ for all of us at the same time.

We had park-hopper tickets and planned to start at Magic Kingdom and "hop" to another park, Epcot Studios, later in the day. I was pleased to learn we wouldn't have to repurchase Genie+ — we could continue to use it in a different park because it was on the same day.

On days when a park is very busy, Genie+ may sell out, according to a Disney press release in June of this year. So while I don't think it's necessary to stay up until 12:01 am to purchase Genie+, you should plan to purchase it before 7 am on the morning of your park visit — I purchased ours at 6:30 am.

One of the more confusing parts of Genie+ that I had to figure out was that you can only reserve one Lightning Lane ride at a time. So once I'd reserved one Lightning Lane ride, I could not select another one either for the next 120 minutes, or until after we'd completed the first ride , whichever came first.

The Lightning Lane reservation showed on the app as a one-hour window to tap in, or scan the Genie+ app, at the Lightning Lane "tapstile," which is a separate lane from the regular wait lane, and continue on to ride the ride.

When I logged on at 7 am, I immediately booked a Lightning Lane reservation for the Jungle Cruise, a ride that almost always has a long wait time. Our time slot was for 8:30-9:30. We arrived at Magic Kingdom shortly after it opened at 8 am and headed straight to Adventureland.

Since I booked us on Jungle Cruise at 7:05 am for an 8:30-9:30 time slot, I couldn't book another Lightning Lane ride until either we rode Jungle Cruise or after 10 am. That's because the 120-minute rule is effective from the park's opening time at 8 am, not from when I booked before park hours.

Since we had an hour-long window to go on Jungle Cruise, I consulted the app to see which nearby rides had short wait times. So before we even went on Jungle Cruise, we knocked out Pirates of the Caribbean — still my all-time favorite Disney ride — and Aladdin's Flying Carpets, using the regular lanes.

Then we went to Jungle Cruise, tapped in with our Lightning Lane access, and bypassed a 35-minute wait in the regular line. We hadn't been in the park an hour and we'd already gone on some of its biggest rides, which I thought was not bad.

And as soon as we tapped in to ride Jungle Cruise at around 9 a.me, I was now free to reserve another Lightning Lane without having to wait until 10 am. Luckily, the Haunted Mansion was available for immediate Lightning Lane access. I used the few minutes we had in the Jungle Cruise line to book us into the Haunted Mansion afterwards, so we zipped onto another big-ticket ride.

Also, our daughter was not interested in any "scary" rides, so much to my and my husband's dismay, we didn't try to get on Space Mountain, Splash Mountain, or Big Thunder Mountain. Because these rides are all in such high demand, their Lightning Lane slots get scooped up right away, so I saw on the app there was less availability most of the time for those rides anyway.

When we were ready to hop over to Epcot around 4 pm, I grabbed the first time slot available for the Frozen ride, which was 8 to 9 pm. That meant that until 6 pm, I couldn't book another Lightning Lane ride.

But by the time 6 pm rolled around, there were no Lightning Lane slots available on any ride we wanted to go on. So we wound up waiting 50 minutes in the regular lane to go on the Ratatouille ride, which I thought wasn't bad for such a popular ride, but still time we would have preferred to use exploring the park.

We lucked out with a relatively quiet day in the Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios, and a kid who wasn't interested in any high-demand thrill rides — meaning we could skip Expedition Everest, the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, and the Rock 'n' Rollercoaster. Other than a 35-minute wait for the Avatar ride and about 45 minutes in line for the Star Wars Rise of the Resistance experience, we didn't spend more than 20 minutes in any line that day.

On our third and last Disney day, we took it easy. We only went to Magic Kingdom and went later in the day so that we could stay late for the nighttime fireworks spectacular. I did buy Genie+ that day, but I'm not sure I would again.

We got to the park around 5 p.m., which was too late to grab Lightning Lane access on many of the rides we wanted to go on, because those slots had already been booked by other Genie+ users. So mostly we just wound up waiting in the regular lines and hitting less in-demand rides and shows, like the Enchanted Tiki Room.

I think the Genie+ app is better for people who plan to get to the parks early, and who are ready to get up early and book their first Lightning Lane ride even before the park opens. In my experience, if you don't get a head start on your fellow park guests, you won't reap the benefits of the app.

On the day we used it, we had so much ground to cover in the Magic Kingdom and the Genie+ service ensured that we got on the rides that mattered most to us.

On days when the parks are very busy, I would consider it an almost indispensable tool for getting on many in-demand rides because it reduces wait time to almost nothing compared to the regular lanes. Even then, you should prepare for some disappointment, as Genie+ doesn't guarantee you Lightning Lane access to every ride you want to go on, and does make you wait in between making reservations.

I recommend consulting different unofficial Disney blogs and websites that predict how busy individual parks will be on a given day. Because I had a hunch that Animal Kingdom would not be busy on a Tuesday in September, I was able to save $45 by not purchasing Genie+ that day.