Surviving the My Disney Experience Experience

Imagine you’re in Disney World. Let’s say Hollywood Studios, standing beside Echo Lake. Just as Hollygroove Swingin’ starts playing, Buzz Lightyear walks by and, caught up in the moment, begins doing the Charleston. It’s bizarre to see someone in a spacesuit try to dance, but he somehow pulls it off. Unfortunately, while all this was happening you were staring at your phone trying to snag a Lightning Lane for Slinky Dog Dash. You missed Buzz entirely.

This is the new reality, where Disney’s official app is taking your attention away from the very park the app was meant to help you enjoy. The My Disney Experience app (MDX) has become central to the experience at Disney World and that was likely intentional, given the name, but now even Disney admits there’s a problem and wants to “break the spell” of people being glued to their phones.

Is it possible to get the most out of your My Disney Experience experience without allowing it to ruin your in-real-life Disney park experience? Yes! You just need to know what to use the app for, what not to use it for.

What to use MDX for

MDX is great for booking Lightning Lanes, ordering food, and bypassing checkout lines at shops - all of which save you time. MDX is also essential for joining virtual queues (on the rare occasions when Disney is using them). For these purposes, MDX is quick and easy: take out your phone, do the thing, and then put your phone back in your pocket.

What not to use MDX for

Trying to improve your Lightning Lanes

Some people spend a lot of park time trying to improve their Lightning Lanes by refreshing the app over and over, hoping something better will pop up. If you’re lucky, you might end up snagging a hard-to-get Lightning Lane, but this is becoming increasingly difficult because you’re competing with bots. Even if 15 minutes of refreshing your app results in a “win”, it’s not worth pulling your focus away from the park you’re there to enjoy. And if you’re with kids, and those kids are anything like mine, after 30 seconds of staring at your phone your kids will start tugging at your sleeve saying “Daddy, daddy!” and working themselves into a day-ruining frenzy. Besides which, you don’t really need to get those impossible to get Lightning Lanes to have an optimal day where you get everything done without spending a ton of time in lines. You just need to have the right plan (more on this later).

Planning and Strategizing

MDX is great for quick transactions, but not planning or strategizing. Sure, MDX will tell you the current wait time at an attraction, and generally how that wait time is going to change throughout the day. But that information in isolation isn’t useful when you’re trying to figure out how to fit that attraction in with all the other things you want to get done in your day.

Disney tried to address this by creating Genie, a feature of MDX that allows you to pick your activities and then suggests times for you to do them. I have not had much success using Genie. It limits you to just a few activities, the suggested times seem random, and it does not help you decide on Lightning Lanes. I suspect Disney built this as a tool to manage crowds, rather than as a tool for you to get the most out of your day.

And figuring out how to maximize your park day is not an easy problem to solve. In fact, it’s excruciatingly difficult. Standby wait times are moving targets. The Lightning Lane system is complicated and it’s hard to predict availability. Layer on top of that the need to get to your dining reservation exactly on time, the challenges of hitting all your must-dos without criss-crossing the park repeatedly, not knowing when a character meet closes, and having to pivot when a ride goes down, it can quickly become overwhelming. Given this, many people just choose to wing it, even though this often means missing out on their favorite rides and enduring longer wait times.

If you don’t like the feeling of spending thousands of dollars to stand in line all day, and not getting to do all your favorite rides, there is another solution.

Pairing MDX with Magic Carpet

On my first family trip to Disney World, I spent countless hours trying to figure out how to maximize our park days and avoid long lineups. I read blogs, watched YouTube videos, listened to opinions on forums, created spreadsheets, and studied the data on thrill-data.com. I realized that the challenge of planning and scheduling a Disney trip boils down to a complex math problem. Fortunately I happened to have a background in mathematical optimization and I was able to develop a solution to this problem. And so, Magic Carpet was born.

Magic Carpet takes the load off your shoulders. You tell it your priorities and it provides you with a customized itinerary, including exactly what Lightning Lanes to book. I realize it may seem counterintuitive that using a second app results in using your phone less, but it really does. While you’re in the parks, you open Magic Carpet to see what’s next, and what Lightning Lane to book next when you scan into one, and that’s it. No more agonizing over wait times, or refreshing for better Lightning Lanes.

With Magic Carpet, you can be spontaneous without anxiety. At any point in your day, you can tell it you want to do something else, and it will give you recommendations, and adapt to whatever you decide to do. It will also show you how changes to your plan will affect the rest of your day, so you can make quick decisions. When an attraction goes down it will alert you and rejig your schedule. It will do all this while minimizing your time walking or spent in line.

By using Magic Carpet as your park strategist and guide, and using MDX only for quick transactions, you can finally break the spell of staring at your phone, leaving you worry-free, in-the-moment, and finally able to enjoy Disney the way you imagined it.