Walt Disney World will soon start rolling out major updates to the My Disney Experience app, aimed at simplifying planning via a new checklist, price comparison tools, AI-driven search & more. This discusses the details and offers commentary about coming changes.
During a recent media briefing last week, leadership from Walt Disney World Product Management, Guest Experience, and Commercial Strategy departments discussed what to expect from the upcoming changes. They also offered us a sneak peek of the upcoming app changes, the most consequential of which I’ll walk you through here.
Unfortunately, we do not have visuals from the presentation, as layout and features are still a work-in-progress and subject to design tweaks before launch. What we saw looked largely fantastic. While I’ll always hold a soft spot for our cluttered and chaotic My Disney Experience home screen, the clean design of the new-look app is a breath of fresh air.
The app changes discussed below do not yet have a firm rollout for deployment. We were told they would begin launching in phases at Walt Disney World in the coming months, and then at Disneyland in the months after that. I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes until October 2026 for the rollout at Walt Disney World, and happens in early 2027 at Disneyland, but hopefully those are conservative estimates.
This actually kicks off the fifth or sixth round of modernizations to the My Disney Experience (MDX) and Disneyland apps (and websites) aimed at improving the user experience in the last couple of years. And you know what? They’ve been fantastic.
Most recently, the miracle of in-app park reservations finally occurred. Many of the biggest improvements prior to then have revolved around the Advance Dining Reservation (ADR) and Lightning Lane systems, and they’ve been big wins for ease of use.
In fact, Walt Disney World shared with us that they’ve seen measurable improvements in guest satisfaction as a result of the changes. For example, combining “Today’s Plans” and “Future Plans” into the cohesive “My Plans” flow on MDX improved ease of use by 8%. Streamlining the ADR booking flow and search improved guest satisfaction by 5% and drove record-high website ratings.
Perhaps most notably, the switch from Genie+ to Lightning Lanes coupled with the shift from day-of booking to pre-arrival reservations led to double-digit gains in both ease of use and overall experience. I told you the Genie+ name was a toxic brand on par with Monsanto, Philip Morris, Comcast, or Robert Chapek!
Joking aside, I’m not surprised by this in the least. We knew that guest satisfaction scores were a big driver behind the switch from Genie+ to Lightning Lane Multi-Pass and Single Pass, even if a vocal minority of power users (us included!) preferred the same-day system.
There were basically two big complaints that pre-arrival Lightning Lanes addressed (aside from line-skipping costing money). The first was the dreaded 7 a.m. wake-up call. The most common criticism we heard of Genie+ from Walt Disney World fans was over the stress of having to wake up early to book ride reservations, doing planning on the fly while on vacation.
The second biggest complaint that the switch to Lightning Lane MultiPass addressed was that Genie+ required guests to spend all day with their faces buried in their phones. By virtue of allowing you to book before your trip, Lightning Lane MultiPass and Single Pass allow you to not spend time on your phone making as many ride reservations during the day. Instead, all of this is offloaded to before the trip, when more people enjoy planning!
Honestly, the only surprise from the numbers Walt Disney World provided was that the ADR changes didn’t result in a bigger jump in guest satisfaction scores. If someone told me all of the other numbers and then asked me to guess what the ADR changes yielded, I would’ve guessed +20%, if not more.
This site is often critical of Disney IT or skeptical that things will go smoothly, but I can’t think of a single complaint about the ADR app changes of the last few years. They’ve been great. We have spent far less time doing the whole dance–searching, refreshing, rechecking, and so forth. The process has been painless and simple.
Disney IT as a whole seems a lot more reliable and prone to fewer problems in the last year. Aside from the Beak & Barrel ADRrrr Day Debacle, we haven’t experienced any discount drop day downtime or interminably long virtual queues in the last couple of years. (Knock on wood.) These issues used to be a weekly, if not daily, occurrence!
Against that backdrop, let’s dig into some of the other changes…
Cleaner Home Screen
Everything is oriented around the guest’s upcoming trip on the new-look home screen, which ditches the neverending tiles in the current apps in favor of a cleaner and simpler style that pulls in reservations, travel parties, and planning reminders.
Leadership acknowledged that one of the biggest guest complaints is navigating the app and finding information that’s relevant to them. With the redesign, everything that guests need will be front and center, and easily accessible.
Trip Planning Checklist
One of the top additions is a new trip checklist feature. This is intended to reduce the anxiety that guests feel when planning, especially first-timers who may not know the key pre-planning milestones, such as booking ADRs and making Lightning Lane selections. (I will personally appreciate the latter, as I’m constantly forgetting when this window actually opens.)
They mentioned that this will include not just a checklist, but also calls to action, such as to add your park tickets to Apple Wallet so you’re not scrambling at the tapstiles. All of this is separate from the hotel check-in checklist, which includes adding your credit card on file, making room requests, etc.
This version is more akin to what Disney Cruise Line uses, and in fact, leadership referenced DCL as a template of sorts for this new feature. If you’ve never used it, the Disney Cruise Line user experience is pretty good. Definitely more straightforward than MDX, but then again, DCL is a simpler type of trip!
New Trip Party
The current process for sharing plans with family and friends is tedious, to use a charitable term. You have to send an email (hoping that you’ve chosen the correct one), and then wait for acceptance. You have to deal with managed guests and more.
Leaders shared that the new version of sharing travel plans will be as easy as sending a text message. Walt Disney World will use industry-standard native device capabilities to pull in contacts from your phone.
From there, you can simply tap the contact and send them a link to the trip. They click that link, accept the invitation, and are added to the trip. It’s as easy as that.
Whereas the checklist feature is inspired by DCL, this trip party feature reminds us of the Tokyo Disney Resort app. WDW leaders did not invoke that by name, but it seems like they’re applying the best lessons learned at other Disney destinations around the globe.
AI Powered Search Results
One of the big improvements coming to the My Disney Experience app experience is upgrading the search experience. Bluntly, search is broken in the current version of the app. It spits back a long list of results that may or may not be related to your query. As the industry moves towards making it easier to get answers to their questions directly in results, so too is Disney’s approach changing.
The new search experience will use the power of AI and leverage all of the data across the Walt Disney World website and answer guests’ questions in a simple summary, so they don’t have to read through multiple FAQs or browse through unrelated results. It will also offer the opportunity to go deeper if guests would like, but the goal is an up-front summary that quickly answers most questions.
I’d envision this working similar to Google AI Overviews. There are a variety of use cases for this, but the one that comes to mind for me is finding food. While I have encyclopedic (and pointless) knowledge of most menus at Walt Disney World, one blind spot for me is which counter service locations serve healthy food for kids. (It’s not all of them, or even most of them!)
Suffice to say, the process of finding a suitable option involves an inordinate amount of clicking. In many cases, search results are wrong or just flat-out nonsensical given the terms entered. Utilizing AI in this way could make sense, although I’ll continue verifying the results since I don’t trust AI to not hallucinate or produce outdated answers.
Given that Disney’s search isn’t great to begin with and even official sources often contain bad or outdated information, I don’t have super high hopes for this. It could work well, but we shall see.
DisneyWorld.com Updates
Leadership also revealed that changes are coming to the website experience and streamlining complexities that exist with finding vacation packages, hotels, tickets, special offers, and more.
This came in response to some guests visiting and revisiting the website 20-30 times before booking. (Wait a second…are they tracking me?!) The updates are meant to reduce this friction, and make it easier to compare pricing across dates, resorts, discounts, etc.
New features on this front will include flexible date searches, price comparison calendars, side-by-side resort hotel comparisons, AI-generated summaries to highlight relevant details or differences.
One thing I would note here is that some of these comparison tools already exist, but just aren’t highlighted well (or don’t work well). Moreover, while the flexible price calendar currently exists and works well for tickets, a similar feature used to offer a monthly view of hotel rates. For reasons beyond me, that has either been discontinued or hidden.
My suspicion was/is that Walt Disney World was better served by a more opaque process, and that’s why the calendar view pricing was removed or buried. Transparency is always good for guests as it aids comparison shopping, but what happens if or when it adversely impacts guest spending metrics?
MDX Change Conclusions
The animating ideas about reducing friction, streamlining the process, and making planning easier for guests all sound great. After the ADR changes, I have more faith in Disney IT being able to deliver results with all of these features.
Disney IT has delivered several improvements over the last few years, and although the product still isn’t perfect, it’s headed in the right direction. Everything recent has been thoughtfully done, intuitive, and actually works. The user experience and interface have measurably improved. The app doesn’t crash as much, or send me in a neverending email verification code loop.
It’s honestly unfortunate that this same time and attention to detail weren’t given to the original Genie system. It still would’ve been hated for being a paid system replacing free FastPass, but maybe not quite as much!
At the same time, it always feels appropriate to have a healthy dose of skepticism when it comes to Walt Disney World and technology. This is, after all, the company that is still using the Go.com portal. (Baby steps.)
I also have hesitations about the aforementioned alignment of guest and corporate interests. Transparency is great for consumers, but what happens if or when it’s detrimental to business?
It used to be a running joke that The ADR Algorithm™️ highlighted the 3 least desirable times at the 3 worst restaurants when displaying only a few results at a time. Then there was the original Genie itinerary builder, which was comically bad in its insistence that guests prioritize the lowest-priority attractions.
Whether all of this was a “clever” and not-so-thinly veiled move to redistribute demand throughout the day to less busy times or a classic Disney IT fail was always up for debate, but we erred on the side of always assuming nothing Disney IT did was a game of 4D chess.
If everything works as advertised, these changes will be great for both diehard Disney fans and first-timers. They’ll make every facet of the planning process easier and more intuitive, which is a sharp contrast to today. Sure, it works for power users (presumably you, if you’re reading this).
All of this has been incredibly unintuitive for the uninitiated in the past. This changes that, and helps bridge the gap between first-timers and power users. As advocates for removing as much friction as possible from Walt Disney World vacations, we’re cautiously optimistic about these proposed improvements.
Walt Disney World has done a lot to even the playing field and make it easier for casual guests. While some fans have bemoaned certain changes (like shorter booking windows), these have been largely positive changes on balance for most average visitors.
We’re very pleased with these enhancements slated to roll out to the apps at Walt Disney World and Disneyland in the coming months and (presumably) into 2027. Given the success of the updates to the restaurant reservation booking systems on both coasts, we find ourselves in the unprecedented (and frankly, uncomfortable!) position of being more optimistic about what Disney IT is doing. Unfortunately, all of this is going to be rendered obsolete once that big beautiful super app launches, but the changes should be guest friendly ones until that totally real app is realized.
Planning a Walt Disney World trip? Learn about hotels on our Walt Disney World Hotels Reviews page. For where to eat, read our Walt Disney World Restaurant Reviews. To save money on tickets or determine which type to buy, read our Tips for Saving Money on Walt Disney World Tickets post. Our What to Pack for Disney Trips post takes a unique look at clever items to take. For what to do and when to do it, our Walt Disney World Ride Guides will help. For comprehensive advice, the best place to start is our Walt Disney World Trip Planning Guide for everything you need to know!
YOUR THOUGHTS
What do you think about these enhancements coming to the Walt Disney World and Disneyland apps? Any other features on your ‘wish list’ for the apps? What’s your experience been like with the apps and Disney IT in the last 12-18 months? Agree or disagree with our assessment? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!
