We got back yesterday and I will give my analysis of Genie +. During our trip, I jotted down the posted standby time and our actual wait on all of our LL rides (I'm a dork). I've already put this in a spreadsheet and done some cost/benefit analysis (like I said, I'm a dork).
We had 7 day tickets for 3 of us (me, husband, daughter) as well as 2 day tickets for my college aged son who flew down separately for the weekend. We also had Park Hoppers. Over those 7 days, we purchased 7 ILL$ ranging from a total of $29 (Space for 3) to $60 (FOP for 4). We did run into a little snag our first day because I bought ROTR ILL for us at 7am but couldn't get one for my son because he wasn't on our hotel reservation. We went to Guest Services as soon as we got to HS and they were nice enough to give us a recovery pass for him - so saved us $15 there. Total we spent almost $300 on those 7 ILL$ - more than I had planned to... it's very easy to drop 30 bucks on Space Mountain when you don't feel like standing in line for 45 minutes. We got FOP and ROTR twice each, plus Everest, Space and Remy. I wouldn't recommend doing Everest since you can ride single rider... but my son wanted us all to ride together, so we spent the money. In total, we saved ourselves about 4.5 hours for our group.
For Genie Plus, we spent $367 total and rode 33 rides. We saved a total of 13.5 hrs for our group. On our best day, we rode 8 rides and saved about 5 hours. On our worst day, we rode 2 rides and saved only 15 minutes - that was our EPCOT day where the plan was to do F&W. I had made a decision ahead of time that I'd rather waste money on that day then have to buy Genie + every morning for the other 6 days. I still standby that, but admit I could have saved myself some money buying it on a day by day basis. We averaged 5 rides with LL per day.
If I divide the time saved by what we spent, then I estimate the cost per hour saved as $37 for our group or $11 if you look at the time saved as multiplying by each person. I'm not sure the $11 is valid since we would be together anyway, but that treats the time of each individual as having a value. So essentially, I have to decide is paying $37/hour to NOT stand in line was worth it for me. Since I hate standing in line, I think I would lean towards saying that it is. I definitely feel like if you plan the
Genie+ game well you can get more done than with the FP system. I really like that I could hop with it, since we hopped every day except for the EPCOT F&W day.
Final note, be aware that buying your ILL$ ahead of time can be a crap-shoot in terms of how much time you'll save. For rides where it runs out (ROTR and FOP) or if you are trying to get a certain time, you have no choice but to buy in the morning but you can't always know what the standby will look like. Our example is probably an anomaly - but I bought FOP one day because we wanted to ride it before our Sanaa dinner so we needed a specific time. It rained that day and the parks cleared out... when we rode FOP the standby was FIVE minutes!! So glad I spent that $30, lol.
All in all - great trip. I'm a project manager and planner by nature, so I had no problem with constantly getting LL and trying to stack (got up to 3 at a time one day) - I actually found it fun. But I could see how it may be stressful for other folks.
Hope this helps someone!
