Here’s my totally chaotic and random Genie Plus strategy, which kind of developed because I was traveling with my 79 year old mum, she couldn’t take more than 3 hours in a park, and we didn’t know until 10am or so what we would do that day, so there was zero planing ahead. This also worked because we had a 14-day all park ticket which you can buy in England!!
As soon as the decision was made to go to one of the Disney parks (this depended on the weather, how we felt over breakfast etc), I bought Genie Plus and immediately booked any random ride which had a return time about 1.5 to 2 hours later. I didn’t care about the ride - the key was to lock it in. At the same time, I went for the individual lightning lane ride (and whilst these had sometimes sold out by this time, I noticed they do come back).
Then en route to the park, I started playing Rob’s Disney Slots for the most difficult ride - this usually worked and I got the times I wanted for Remy, Navi, Jungle Cruise, Peter Pan etc. Then if we didn’t hit the park until 2 hours after I booked the first ride, I started stacking and booked the next, again any random ride with a return time about 30 mins after the first.
Then I literally just went round the parks, booking any random ride even one I didn't want to go on, then playing the slots doing all the rides we wanted over a period of about 3 - 4 hours. If on a particular day we decided not to hit the parks until the evenings, then I stacked rides like crazy and kept on moving back their times to later in the day by playing the slots over and over. Whilst I aimed to stagger the rides, sometimes I had small overlaps but that didn’t matter given the length of the return times.
There was only one miss and one near-miss with this strategy - Frozen at Epcot and Slinky Dog at Hollywood. Frozen was sold out by the time we had decided to go to Epcot, but I played the slots during every queue I stood in, eventually got a time for later that day! It was massively hard work though.
Slinky I had to give up on, as mum was beat and wanted to go home, but we did get a great ILL for Rise of the Resistance and Avatar for about an hour after we arrived at the parks, even though the ILL kept on showing up as sold out.
Moral of the story - sold out rides do come back but you need real persistence. I also noticed that I often lost return times between the time the slot showed up to the time I clicked on it - even a 1 second delay and I missed it.
So basically - my Genie Plus strategy was completely random, chaotic, unplanned, and probably totally the opposite of what I should do (forced by circumstances), but we did get on everything - of course that only worked because we were there over 14 days so could do the same parks twice if we didn't get our rides in on a particular day.
This strategy (if you can make sense of it because my post is a bit chaotic too just like my strategy) is recommended for seniors, people who don’t like to plan ahead, or people who are just a bit disorganised! :-) Maybe Rob can make a video on it, ha ha!
If you don't mind me asking how did your Mother handle all the walking and the physicality of some of the faster rides (if you did any?). My Dad is 72 and didn't come with us when we went, mainly because he thought it would be too much for him. We're also from the UK.
Sounds like you did great on Genie+!
This doesn’t sound random or chaotic to me at all! You may think it was all ‘unplanned’, but you had to do a LOT of planning just to learn how to use G+ to the max! That some serious G+ Jedi work you did there, Andy! Sounds like the ideal Disney vacation to me and I hope you had a Magical trip!