Step 4. ON-SITE: Purchase any Individual Lightning Lanes, continued
Let's be honest. If you're going to buy one Individual Lightning Lane at Animal Kingdom, it's got to be AVATAR Flight of Passage. It's not uncommon for the wait for Flight of Passage to hover between 90 minutes and 2.5 hours during even moderately crowded times of year. Again, Animal Kingdom has so few rides that you can wait two hours for the "big one" and still get to everything else – especially with a wise touring plan. Flight of Passage also has an absolutely incredibly queue that's somewhat of a "walkthrough" in its own right.
But if you do wait Stand-by for Flight of Passage, you'll experience the "joy" of seeing (at typical minimum) eight Lightning Lane guests boarding for every two Stand-by, which is, honestly, pretty miserable.
Flight of Passage "ILLs" typically run $14 per person. Obviously, that's a pretty gutsy money grab from Disney given that the ride's FastPasses were, of course, free. But many guests begrudgingly buy the add-on, recognizing that spending $14 to avoid a two-hour line works out to $7 an hour – an amount most of us would agree our time is worth. Note that you do not have to have purchased Genie+ to buy priority boarding at an Individual Lightning Lane attraction, which is why some guests forego Genie+ on their Animal Kingdom day and put the money toward a Flight of Passage ILL instead.
Here's the only caveat: unlike Genie+ Lightning Lanes (which open to all guests with Genie+ at 7:00), only guests with a linked on-site hotel reservation can purchase access to the Individual Lightning Lane rides at 7:00 (one of increasingly few "perks" of staying on-site). If you're staying off-site, you have to wait until park opening. The good news is, Animal Kingdom typically opens the earliest out of all of Disney World's parks (often 8:00 AM), so chances are that some Individual Lightning Lane slots will still remain. (EPCOT, on the other hand, routinely opens at 10:00, leaving a 3-hour on-site-exclusive purchase window for its ILL rides).
Individual Lightning Lane access to Flight of Passage does sell out within an hour or two, so if you're going to buy it, buy it as early as you can. Unlike FastPass and Genie+ Lightning Lanes that assign you the next-soonest return window, "ILL" purchases at Disney World allow you to select from any available return windows. The app will display the soonest on the Tip Board, but you can select any hour of the day to view available return windows during that hour like booking a Dining Reservation. It's not a bad idea to book a return time before or after lunch. (Note that having an Individual Lightning Lane has no bearing on holding Genie+ Lightning Lanes. In other words, no one-at-a-time rule to worry about. You can even select a return window that overlaps with a Genie+ Lightning Lane.)
Just your friendly neighborhood fan of tropical hideaways, Victorian boardwalks, mid-century tomorrows, ancient temples, and cursed forests! In between dreaming of Dole Whips, I'm a museum experience developer. I'm also the researcher behind Theme Park Tourist's Legend Library– filled with stories of Lost Legends, Modern Marvels, Declassified Disasters, and more.
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