Competition for Lightning Lanes can be fierce in higher crowds due to more guests buying Multi-Pass line-skipping. Despite surge pricing that can cause the paid FastPass service to cost around $40 on busy days, demand is highest when attendance and wait times are at their worst. (Updated February 23, 2025.)
Accordingly, you need advanced strategy to score the most ride reservations, especially during the busiest dates when Lightning Lane Multi-Pass is most expensive and lines are longest. Unfortunately for power users, most of the next-level hacks that were exploited under Genie+ are all gone under LLMP. There’s no 120 minute rule, stacking is no longer a thing, and speed strategy doesn’t matter as much.
Fortunately, there are new ways to squeeze the most out of Multi-Pass, which we explain in our Top 10 Tips & Tricks for Lightning Lanes at Walt Disney World in 2025. That’s a crash course in turning you into a Lightning Lanes power user, and we’d highly recommend it for all the ins and outs. Of those strategies, there’s a reason why “Have a Strong Refresh Game” is far and away the #1 tip & trick for Lightning Lane Multi-Pass at Walt Disney World. This post is intended to do a deeper dive, explaining why that matters and how it works.
None of this is explained by Walt Disney World on its official sites, and probably for good reason–these tips can be confusing and overwhelming. However, if you take ~30 minutes to learn those ins and outs, you won’t just be above average–you’ll be a top 5% Lightning Lane Multi-Pass power user.
Before we dig into the details, a couple of warnings are in order. First, this is confusing or intimidating at first. While you can comprehend the contours by reading, you really need to learn this one by doing. The below explanation will make a whole lot more sense once you actually start using Lightning Lane Multi Pass.
Even if you leave this post more confused than when you started, that’ll quickly change once you start actually playing the refresh game. The learning curve is steep in the abstract, but not in practice.
Second, this will absolutely increase your screen time. I know that’s a major concern with a lot of Walt Disney World vacation planners, and some of our other advice avoids being glued to your phone. This does not. Playing the refresh game is addictive, and you could spend hours of your day trying to trade up your Lightning Lane selections and return times.
Because of that, we highly recommend setting some ground rules. Mine is that I only play the refresh game in the Lightning Lane return line after tapping in. This means I have anywhere from 2 minutes to 10 minutes–it all depends on whether there are two tap points, where merge occurs, etc. I’ll also look for ride reservation refills any time I’m waiting–to pick up a Mobile Order, the rest of my party to get out of the restroom, etc.
While this does require more screen time, it does not have to require hours of screen time. To the contrary, I view playing the refresh game as being addictive in a bad way. Searching for 5-10 minutes per attraction is a good use of time, and will usually work out to your advantage. Anything more than that and you quickly start hitting the point of diminishing returns.
With those warnings out of the way, let’s get down to brass tacks and discuss what the heck ride reservation refill rules even are. And for that, we rewind to March 2020, in the halcyon days of FastPass+ at Walt Disney World…
There’s a reason we’re calling this “ride reservation refill rules,” and it’s not just because I’m a sucker for a good alliteration. It’s because this is nothing new, and was something Walt Disney World had been fine-tuning in the final days of FastPass+. I don’t remember precisely when they started, but it became a more pronounced practice in 2019. (Or so it seemed to me.)
Walt Disney World would add same-day FastPass+ ride reservations for headliner attractions “at random” throughout the day. Except it wasn’t really at random, it was based on a set schedule. The whole purpose of this was to throw a bone to guests who didn’t realize ride reservations were booked 30/60 days in advance, and showed up at the parks with nothing in hand.
Essentially, it was an attempt to remedy guest complaints about FastPass+ from first-timers. Except, like all things, the predictable process was reverse-engineered and it was better exploited by the savviest planners than ill-prepared newbies.
Almost identical ride reservation refill rules were built into the Lightning Lanes for the exact same reasons. That includes the now-defunct Genie+ system. If you already played the refresh game with that, you already know how this works–the mechanics have changed slightly, but the idea is the same.
Moving forward, here’s everything else you need to know about ride reservation refill rules under Lightning Lane Multi-Pass at Walt Disney World…
Refills vs. Cancellations
It should go without saying, but these are not the same. If one party cancels a ride reservation, that single reservation returns to the system along with its exact time slot. There are a lot of guests all using Lightning Lane Multi-Pass at the same time.
Let’s say that 9 different parties all see and attempt to book one reservation for Slinky Dog Dash. Obviously, only one can–and that happens in milliseconds, before Disney’s systems can reflect that it’s gone to everyone else. Making matters worse, all can initiate the booking process and it will disappear out from under 8 of you.
Cancellations can become easier to identify over time because they will be for some random time. Once that’s booked, the return time clock jumps back to wherever it was in its cycle before (or goes unavailable, as the case may be). By contrast, reservation refills restart the clock and advance incrementally over the course of a few minutes (sometimes less, sometimes more) before booking up.
Party Size Does Not Matter
This is really only a tangential point, but it’s something that comes up a lot, and relates to the first point of confusion. If you see a cancellation, but are one of the disappointed parties that were too slow to book it, there might be the assumption that it’s because your party was too large.
Truthfully, I don’t know whether that’s the case with cancellations–if it shows for everyone despite not being a fit. Nothing would surprise me, but I do know that even as a party of 1, I am routinely have the cancelled reservation rug pulled out from under me.
What I also know is that party size doesn’t matter with ride reservation refills. Lightning Lanes are not like Advance Dining Reservations–Walt Disney World is not trying to match attraction vehicle seating with hourly capacity. That’s not even remotely possible. It’s a pure numbers game: X number of ride reservations are released, and that number can be booked in any permutation possible.
Refilled Ride Roster
Here are the attractions that we’ve seen get reservation refills at one point or another:
- Magic Kingdom: Tiana’s Bayou Adventure (far and away the most common as of 2025), Jungle Cruise, Haunted Mansion, Peter Pan’s Flight, Pirates of the Caribbean, Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, Space Mountain
- EPCOT: Frozen Ever After, Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, Soarin’ Around the World
- Hollywood Studios: Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway, Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run, Slinky Dog Dash, Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, Toy Story Mania, Twilight Zone Tower of Terror
- Animal Kingdom: Avatar Flight of Passage, Kilimanjaro Safaris, Na’vi River Journey
Note that some of those are Lightning Lane Single Pass attractions.
Do These Ride Reservation Refills Always Happen?
Nope. Some attractions have their Lightning Lane availability replenished on a regular basis, others happen on rare occasion, and most are somewhere in between the two extremes. I could share a bunch of refill times here today, and they could be wrong tomorrow, next week or month.
The most illustrative example is Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. It uses ride reservation refills much more frequently than other attractions due to its unreliability. If it’s having a “bad” day, refills will be sparse or nonexistent. If it’s having a “good” day, you may regularly find same-day Lightning Lane drops that are only 10 to 30 minutes out.
Less extreme examples occur with most other attractions when attendance is not as heavy as internal forecasts projected. If Walt Disney World expected 50,000 guests, but there only 40,000 guests showed up, that’s a pretty big miss on the projection. This opens up the door for more ride reservation refills, as Disney load balances between the Lightning Lanes and standby lines.
When Are Lightning Lane Ride Reservation Refill Times?
I want to stress that there are no guarantees.
Moreover, I don’t have the level of firsthand testing experience necessary to spot patterns. There was a time when I was buying and using Lightning Lanes at least once per week at Walt Disney World, as we worked to put together our resources. However, as the paid FastPass service has become more stable, the need for further testing has decreased. And we’d rather not waste money, so we’ve slowed that down to about once per month, or whenever things change. (For example, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure and Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind switching to standby–that doesn’t pertain directly to LLMP, but it has second-order effects.)
The good news is that the folks over at Thrill-Data track what they call Lightning Lane “popup releases” (same kinda thing, different name). The list of attractions appears incomplete to me, but it should give you an idea of when to expect ride reservation refills or popup releases.
It’s worth pointing out that their data is automated–meaning an actual human isn’t reviewing the app and making notes of what’s being refilled. That means they can–and do–miss refills that appear and vanish quickly. It’s also worth pointing out that refills are mostly same-day under Lightning Lane Multi-Pass, but I’ve also seen them during the initial pre-arrival selection process. So if you don’t more screen time before leaving home, you can give this a try then, too.
What’s the Best Approach to Snagging Refills?
You should immediately choose the best available option after you’ve tapped into Lightning Lane to unlock your next selection (taking advantage of the “rolling 3 rule,” a related concept, is key to getting the most mileage out of LLMP). Always book something–do not refresh and wait for the “perfect” Lightning Lane. Booking another ride reservation is essentially a hedge.
From there, play the refresh game by searching for something better. My tried and true Lightning Lane refresh strategy is tapping in, booking the best available option, and then modifying. Although the above list of ride reservation refill attractions can be helpful, I guess, I’ve found the actual list of attractions to be longer–and drop times more scattershot–in my testing of LLMP. Basically, I’m spamming the modify button.
There are a few approaches for refreshing from here, but I favor toggling the “close” dropdown on the modify screen to refresh times. I do this repeatedly every few seconds for the duration of that 5 minute clock (see the top of the screenshots). About 75% of the time, I’ll find something better within that span of time.
Compare the left and right, the latter of which shows pop-up availability for 4:25 pm that wasn’t there 2 minutes earlier. In my experience, toggling this “close” dropdown is the most efficient way to play the refresh game.
Finally, we want to underscore yet again that Lightning Lanes are not the end-all, be-all of park touring strategy. Our Best Time-Saving Strategy at Walt Disney World covers the best and worst ways to beat the crowds right now and Lightning Lanes are not the best (and certainly not the easiest) way in 2 of the 4 parks.
The only parks where Lightning Lane Multi-Pass works better than all other strategies are Disney’s Hollywood Studios and Magic Kingdom. Everywhere else, there are superior strategies for saving time waiting in line. At all 4 parks, there are alternative approaches that work well enough, don’t cost money, require as much backtracking, and do not involve screen time.
The bottom line is that you could ignore Lightning Lanes entirely–pretend they don’t even exist–and still have a fantastic trip. Don’t let FOMO get the best of you–buying Lightning Lanes is not a “need” and there are plenty of other ways to beat the crowds. If you’re overwhelmed by Lightning Lane Multi Pass, the aforementioned post is the most succinct resource for current strategy.
Ultimately, this might be confusing or frustrating, but it’s important to remember that this is essentially a “loophole” and Disney itself doesn’t publish anything about ride reservation refills for a reason. This is not meant to be common knowledge–they’re supposed to be a ‘relief valve’ of sorts for guests who don’t know all of the ins and outs, and are just randomly looking for availability.
While the ground covered here is good information to have, at the end of the day all you really need to know is that spamming the modify button can help you trade up attractions and return times thanks to ride reservation refills. (There’s a reason why our Top 10 Tips & Tricks for Lightning Lanes at Walt Disney World in 2025 is much more succinct!)
The bottom line is that much knowledge will help you make better choices and get more mileage from Multi-Pass. To quote the great Indiana Jones (Adventure): “Real Rewards Await Those Who Choose Wisely.” For everything else you need to know about LLMP, see our Guide to Lightning Lanes at Walt Disney World.
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
Do these ride reservation refill rules make sense to you or is it too overwhelming? Will you use this strategy for scoring Lightning Lane selections? Have you had success in getting Slinky Dog Dash during one of these refills? What about headliners in other parks? Thoughts on leveraging ride reservation refills versus other strategy? Do you agree or disagree with my 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!
