Issues Arise With the Return of All Day Park Hopping

Disney World finally lifted park hopping restrictions after 4 years. But, a lot of things have changed in that time, and some issues are already popping up that could have a negative impact on your plans.

All Day Park Hopping

Since March 2020, all day park hopping has been non-existent at Disney World. When the parks reopened in July 2020, there was no park hopping allowed at all.

Then, in early 2021 Disney introduced park-hopping after 2:00 pm. And now, 3 years later, all day park hopping returns.

However, a lot has changed since then. First, is the introduction of Genie+ and all the changes it brought. And, virtual queues have certainly changed since March 2020. We ran into some issues with both today, the first day of all day park hopping. Specifically, how this affects Annual Passholders.

Issue #1 Virtual Queue

Annual Passholders must still book park passes because those are not date-based tickets. However, with the nature of virtual queues it was a little unclear how that would work for Annual Passholders.

We booked a park pass for Animal Kingdom today and were not able to join either virtual queues at Epcot and Magic Kingdom at 7:00 am. It appears Passholders must still hold a park pass for the park they want to obtain a queue for, even if they are able to make it to the second park before their return time expires.

With the 1:00 pm queue, we assume that will not be an issue to get one as long as the Passholder scans into the park before then.

Issue #2 Lightning Lanes

Since we could not get a virtual queue at 7:00 am we decided to test out Lightning Lanes. Again, with a park pass at Animal Kingdom we attempted to obtain a Lightning Lane return time at Hollywood Studios.

It would not let us book a Lightning Lane in Hollywood Studios before 2:00 pm. It appears the My Disney Experience technology did not release the 2:00 pm restrictions.

Depending on the return time, it would either tell us we were not eligible or it would give us a return time after 2:00. Hopefully these issues will be fixed soon.

Again, we want to reiterate this for Annual Passholders. We were not able to test with a date-based ticket that does not require any park passes.

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Have you run into any issues today with all day park hopping? Do you have a date-based ticket? Did you experience any of the above issues? Let us know in the comments below.