I know it is winter and I never like to leave home during ski season but I spent last week at Disneyland. My son gave his two kids a trip to the "Happiest place on Earth" for Christmas and allowed me and my wife to tag along. As it was our grandchildren's first visit; we had to go. Now that I am back, I can say I didn't mind taking a few days off from skiing. We have not had snow for a few weeks and the mountains could use a fresh coat of paint.
We arrived Sunday evening and prepared for our first trip into the park on Monday. I made sure to print out our tickets as well as the QR codes for our reservations as they are required for the park. I like having printed copies of things but that is the old-fashioned way of doing things. Before leaving home I had also loaded the Disneyland app onto my smartphone and that held the keys to the kingdom (pun intended). All I really needed to do was to just log into the app with the same e-mail I had made my reservations and everything transferred over. That is what my son did he didn't have to worry about carrying a bunch of paper printouts.
For those who have not been to Disneyland in a long time, Fast Pass no longer exists. Instead you have the option of paying $20 per day and getting access to Genie+. That allows you to use your smartphone and reserve a spot in line for most of the rides. We didn't understand that and quickly discovered that not getting Genie+ meant waiting in long lines even during off season when the lines are not supposed to be that long.
For the second day of the trip we headed to California Adventure. Unfortunately there are not a lot of rides that benefit from Genie+ so we opted not to purchase the $20 feature. In hindsight, I think we made the right decision but I have come to hate standing in line.
We headed back to Disneyland on the third day and once inside the park immediately purchased the Genie+ feature. Then we booked our first ride at Space Mountain right at 9am, when the park opened. As we had a 2-year old that couldn't ride the roller coasters, we then used the baby-swap feature to ride immediately again. That allowed 4 of us to jump to the front of the line, swap a guardian for the little one, and 4 of us to ride again. We probably rode twice as many rides on Wednesday as we did on Monday.
The Disneyland app is not just useful for jumping to the beginning of lines. We used it to discover that the ride whose line we were in had broken down. Sometimes that spurred us to jump out of line and go somewhere else. You can also use the app to order food and have it ready when you go by the restaurant.
I am fairly technical and am not afraid to use my smartphone to its full potential. There are quite a few Disneyland guests that aren't so comfortable with technology and I had to wonder how they enjoyed the park. My guess is they get one of the younger members of their party to take care of streamlining their visit with the help of technology. While I am not a fan of the Disneyland app, it did cut down on a lot of waiting and I appreciated that.
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