Make Genie+ Easy w/ Standby Skipper | Ep. 309

[Music] hi I'm Joe from as of Joe flies and I'm lesie from trips with ties and welcome back to Disney deciphered so on today's episode we are going to be talking about standby Skipper an app that purported helps you with your genie plus lightning Lane strategy at Walt Disney World before we get to that and we're going to get right into it today though but we wanted to quickly thank one of our newest patreon supporters who do we have to thank today Lesley we're thanking Abigail P if you're interested in supporting the podcast go to patreon.com Disney decipher where you can select different ways to support us and we love providing trip reports and unfiltered episodes and add free access to our podcast and all sorts of other little goodies and Extras to our patreon supporters thanks so much to everyone new and old for supporting the podcast all right so lesie before we talk about standby Skipper which again is an app that's going to help you book your genie plus lightning Lanes we should start by taking a minute or two and talking about why haven't we covered it yet I will go with the first reason the first reason we haven't covered it is lesie I think frankly we have felt like we don't need such an app and we will go through at the end of this episode or some point in this episode talk about whether Disney Fanatics like you and me who have recorded hours and hours of content about G plus you know whether we could benefit by using standby Skipper or not but there are also other reasons we haven't covered it yet lesie we've kind of avoided it on this podcast well we kind of kept thinking it was going to get shut down because so many of these things that tap into Disney systems have over the years especially ones that are paid Services the ones sometimes that are free that that somebody who's just kind of like a developer who loves you know figuring how out how these things work that you know have created have lasted longer but usually when someone's making money off of the backs of Disney Disney shuts it down I mean they just did that right to all of the VIP tour guides who were sort of coming in so we just kept thinking it was not long for this world but it's hung in and many more people are using it and we've also thought I guess Joe that as soon as we record an episode about it then Disney's going to shut it down or change Genie plus which we are expecting to happen so maybe this is our way recording this episode is our way to try to get Disney to finally change Genie plus and give us those 2024 changes that they promised so we're putting it out there in the universe maybe yeah and if you own standby Skipper and you're listening to this we apologize if we've put you out of business I record this episode lesie you just gave me like a very large kind of fear shock because I realized we are recording this exactly two weeks before we plan to release the episode which means it it could all be destroyed before that we release this but we will find out and we'll get into it so let's get into standby Skipper and what it is now I've said it a couple times but to be a little bit more specific about it it's an app that you can download and then you're going to pay a fee and what it's going to do is it's going to search and book your genie plus lightning lanes for you now it's not like automatic right it's not like you lesie are like Hey Joe can you book my lightning lanes for you for me and then I just go and book whatever I want for you while you're in the Parks you know I've done that for well the only person I've ever done that for is my wife and her sister but I've done that before right where someone's in the Parks and I'm just helping them book their Genie plus lightning Lanes it's not like that you have to tell it what you want to book but you tell standby Skipper what you want a book and then it's going to book it for you all right so let's talk about the process of using standby Skipper lesie just so I'm not talking this whole entire episode I've written up the steps they're pretty straightforward so why don't you run through them and then when we get to the more nitty-gritty stuff you know I'll jump in all right so first you got to download the app and I presume Joe it's available on iPhone and Android is that right yes and also Windows zoon oh just kidding no okay and then you need to make the purchase and price for this is $25 for one day of use or you can purchase seven consecutive days and that's $45 so if you're going to use it for two days or more you should buy that longer package and then you need to friend request standby Skipper they become part of your friends and family on My Disney Experience as I understand it and that's sort of how they're able to get around I guess maybe some of the it things that Disney doesn't like because that is legit to friend somebody and use that as the the the method in and then you need to buy Genie plus of course you can't do that until midnight the night before standby Skipper you can purchase up to 30 days in advance if I remember correctly and so you can kind of do that first before your trip and then you know like you're going to buy Genie plus you know at midnight the rest of the time then you do that and then once you purchase Genie plus you can set up the searches that you want in standby Skipper so hopefully I've gotten I know enough about it I haven't used it myself that that is the the general parameter yeah that's pretty much it and I will say right now you still actually in fact you're going to probably want to stay up until midnight to buy Genie plus and then sleep in maybe I don't we'll talk about that now lesie you said the last step is to set up your searches and we should point out that standby Skipper has five different options for your searches and I do like how they have spread this out and made it simpler than looking for specific times cuz I feel like that would be too cumbersome instead they've broken it into five different types of searches so the first search is an anytime search basically it's like I say I want to book Remy's ratou Adventure standby Skipper looks for Remy's ratou Adventure if it's available at any time during the day it just books that time done then there are morning searches it will only book it if it's between Park open and noon afternoon searches between no and 4: evening searches between 4 and park close and then then the last type of search which is probably going to be the most useful for people like us lesie except for maybe in the morning is the as soon as possible the ASAP search which will look for the attraction that you're looking for within the next two hours so this is really great for morning Mad Dash that kind of strategy please refer back to episode 256 our gen plus 101 episode if you are not clear what the morning Mad Dash is so those are the types of searches that you can have have a nice thing is you can set up multiple searches in fact you should set up multiple searches and have it searching at the same time so you don't really want to you do not really want to be looking for one attraction at a time you want standby Skipper to be looking for multiple attractions and then when you get a lightning Lane booked you're going to receive a push notification from standby Skipper now one small like hiccup here is I did have trouble seeing the time on the push notification I don't know if it's because of like the size of my phone or whatever so I did have to go into my Disney Experience to see what the actual you know push notification or excuse me what the actual return time was from my lightning Lane so standby Skipper will book all your gen plus lightning Lane attractions for you what's the one thing that we love doing lesle that unfortunately standby Skipper will not do for us modify so that's really important for folks who are modifying and fine-tuning like we are we really like to make sure that we are like not wasting five minutes here and there and so yeah if you if you like to modify this you have to DIY you know I think a lot of folks like to use standby Skipper sort of as it's good enough but if it needs to be optimized then you're going to have to do some manual work exactly so I tried standby skipper for three days only actually was in the parks for two but I paid for an extra day of Genie plus and tested it on my day that I was arriving on Friday of course I got at 11:00 p.m. so I didn't actually ride any attractions but I was testing an afternoon stack to see how standby Skipper would do booking lightning lanes for me for an afternoon on a travel day if you're not sure what an afternoon stack is again episode 256 Genie plus 101 so lesie I sent you all the you know I was like in the midst of traveling and roller blade and roller skating as I've mentioned already do you recall like what attractions and I was doing Hollywood Studios what attractions did standby Skipper manage to get for me so it booked you Mickey and Minnie's runaway Railway Millennium Falcon smuggers Run Slinky Dog Dash and then it booked you alien swirling saucers but you actually modified that to Toy Story Mania so four top tier attractions for an afternoon stack I presume Joe and I you didn't tell me this did you select Slinky Dog dash for the afternoon as your sort of first pick is that how you said it initially yeah so one thing I'm still not completely sure about with standby Skipper I do feel like it kind of knows what to prioritize and I think it would prioritize finding Slinky Dog Dash but I didn't want to like risk it and so what I did for my stack is and this is where you still have to have an understanding of Genie plus to use standby Skipper at least well you could put all the attractions down and then Genie and then standby Skipper will get whatever it gets for you but I was like I want to test to see if standby Skipper can definitely get me slinky dog Dash in the afternoon so that I know when I'm arriving I can go to Hollywood Studios and ride it and so the first attraction I only put Slinky Dog Dash down and then waited for standby Skipper to grab that after that point then I started putting two three attractions down at a time so I think I had Mickey minis Runway Railway Smugglers Run and Tower of Terror I had it searching for those three at the same time it grabbed me Mickey and Minnie second then Smugglers never grabbed Tower of Terror but at that point I only had one sear so I added Toy Story Mania and alien swirling saucers and then like you said it grabbed alen swirling saucers and I was like no I'll be able to get that later I modified it to Toy Story Mania I can't even remember if I ended up reactivating the alen swirling sausage search but I'm sure I could have gotten that so I mean it's pretty good stack overall especially a really good stack if you consider if you're actually traveling you probably don't have time to you know the worst part about Genie plus is setting these 2hour alarms for yourself and I didn't have to worry about any of that yeah that's that's pretty solid and I mean yeah you probably could have done that and then more yourself but you would have been on the phone a lot on a travel day which is not entirely realistic so I really like it I like the result that you have for a travel day for that afternoon and evening stack so very very good all right so let's talk about some of the the hiccups I mean you you said you you think it knows about prioritization but I mean at least from what I read on the website it doesn't and maybe it does for Slinky maybe that's exception so you know but it did give you alien swirly saucers instead of choice Story Mania so I think like you say it maybe is not great at prioritization or maybe if it's run by my kids you know you never know oh yeah yeah you never know you never know who's behind you never know who's behind the standby Skipper yeah so I would say that I question it's prioritization so if there's a attraction you really want definitely go ahead and only search for that attraction but once you get to that level that part of the day where you're like you have a handful of attractions but you don't really care which one you go to first then you can start those multiple searches I used it for two morning mad dashes so I did Hollywood Studios on Saturday and Magic Kingdom on Sunday and so for both those days I started the day you know I bought Genie Plus at 12 and then I set both up for just one search right and of course for Hollywood Studios I had to search for Slinky Dog Dash and for Magic Kingdom I had it searching for Peter Pan it grabbed both of those sometime before I woke up like I was waking up at like 7:45 or 8 so I grabbed both of those for like a 9:15 return so pretty good and not having to wake up was great of course not waking up lesie I was like oh stand by Skipper it let me sleep in this is great but you know I Disney rookie mistake lesli forgot I had to wake up at 7 a.m. to do all this other stuff right yeah you still got to wake up at 7:00 a.m. for your virtual cu's you still got to wake up at 7:00 a.m. for your paid lightning Lanes if you're doing any of those things you're still you're still getting up so so did you get up no I didn't and I was like oh shoot now I can't ride rise with resistance and and I was like oh shoot like I didn't get a virtual queue for Tron so I'm going to buy the lightning Lane for it instead the Tron lightning Lane doesn't sell out that fast so you know that wasn't hard to buy it 8 o'clock or whatever but it is nice to not have one extra thing to worry about at 7 o'clock and so that's kind of how it goes now for both Hollywood Studios and Magic Kingdom once I got that first attraction once I rode that first attraction I would have standby Skipper searching for like two to three attractions at a time and so at Magic Kingdom I did a pretty good job you know I was going from attraction to attraction it was it was a pretty busy weekend overall so return times were pushing back pretty quickly it was really good to have standby Skipper there to help I think the biggest win for standby Skipper is I was just testing it and I booked Remy's Ratatouille adventure and I just said get it anytime in the afternoon but when I started the search it was around lunchtime and there was no lightning Lane return times left for Remy's ratat 2 Adventure so I was like let's see what standby Skipper can do because we've talked about on this podcast in the past I have like been on my phone constantly refreshing and checking for Remy and then eventually one popping up and grabbing it it took a couple hours but around 3 or so or I can't remember exactly what time lo and behold I got a push notification from standby Skipper that they grabbed me at Remy's for like four or 5:00 so I mean that that was a big win right there and really saved me a lot of time looking at my phone and saved me a lot of battery as well from refreshing and stuff like that that's a great use of it as well if there's sort of like a ride that you're desperate to ride and you think it's gone for the day and you're going to be refreshing refreshing refreshing then that's that's definitely a great use of it so what are some of the tips that you learned sort of from from using it over the course of these I guess three days in total definitely search for multiple attractions at the same time again because we're not sure what it prioritizes I would say to play it safe when you're searching for multiple attractions have them at your same mental level of priority especially like with something like alien solling saucers if you know that you want Toy Story Mania but it's returning in a couple hours and you just want to ride alien swirling sausage right now and you can grab a genie Plus for it right now then you don't need to use standby Skipper just go into my Disney Experience book aliens St saucers then have standby Skipper searching for Toy Story Mania and another attraction for you later but definitely multiple searches is very good another really nice thing is that it'll search for up to 12 people and it'll search for Gen plus Landing lanes for everyone in your friends list so this is a little bit of a like a sharing Memory Maker type situation so you know if you are with a large group like you can have it searching for Haunted Mansion for four people here while searching for Big Thunder for four people there I mean so you can set up multiple searches at a time and it will do that for you that's actually pretty useful because again you you have to set it up on standby Skipper but you don't have to be like on your My Disney Experience like refreshing and then checking the time and then like seeing if it stays and you know all that of course it's only going to get you whatever time it ends up getting you but you can work off of that and modify off of that so that's really helpful I think if you really want to maximize it you still have to be a pretty active you can think of standby Skipper as a backup that it's going to book something for you in case you forget to book it or you know you forget sometimes I go through the line I tap into to the attraction and I forgot I forget to or I don't want to pick up my phone while I'm waiting in the lightning Lane to get my next one well standby Skipper will do that for you that's pretty good but like we talked about already modify aggressively if you need to to maximize your plan and to maximize your time I really started thinking of standby Skipper as like an assistant something that would help me if I forgot something that would like help remind me or help take care of it in the background for me but I would still be kind of actively I think if it was on a trip where I wasn't just testing standby Skipper and I was like using it but like for my family I would still be decently active on My Disney Experience myself but not as much as if I was just doing everything myself sure all right well I want to talk about a couple questions that came up as you're describing this that I had did you try at any point to see if you could beat it right were you at at any point you know okay you set it to look for sinky dog dash at 7: a.m. for the afternoon or whatever were you trying to see if you could get something first or were you just letting the app run and then modifying after I was letting the app run to test it I think we could beat it I don't we we couldn't we couldn't necessarily beat it when it's the Remy situation we probably couldn't beat it just because we are not going to pull down and refresh as efficiently as a computer will and I'm I'm sure they don't search like every single second or something like that but still just in terms of like if you're thinking about realistically when you're in the Parks you don't want to be staring at your phone the whole time walking through World celebration Gardens which is really nice journey of water which is really nice you don't want to be just constantly pulling down and refreshing so I think in that instance we probably wouldn't be able to beat standby Skipper I do think that we are faster finger at 7: a.m. like I don't think it necessarily like searches right at 7: a.m. and you know at this point in our Disney careers lesie with the amount of experience we have with time.gov and getting our party set up and clicking immediately I think we like for example I probably could have gotone a 9:00 a.m Slinky Dog Dash but in the long run like 9:00 a.m. 9:15 a.m. and the difference between you know being awake at 7:00 or not being aw you know it it adds up in terms of its utility whether we can beat it or not it's it would be more like a pride thing to prove that you could like beat the computer a little bit do you want to play a game but you know it's it's it's beatable but not necessarily worth the effort it would take to beat it got it I mean in some ways I think you were looking for it to get that afternoon time for Slinky Dog Dash it seems like it's able to do that better than a human is because you aren't able to see the return time at 7: a.m. that you're trying to book so you know it's good for but I guess if you're trying to get that that early morning Slinky then maybe the the human element is the better way to go all right other question did you get any multi experience passes did you have any rides go down that converted into multis and how does standby Skipper handle that I'm curious like does it know that now you're eligible to book another one and it go ahead it goes ahead and does that I didn't run that situation but I'm like pretty sure that it would know because it's basically you know the thing is yes standby Skipper isn't hacking into Disney or whatever but it is making calls to the server and basically it's the same as if I used my phone and searched for a lightning Lane it's just I don't know how standby Skipper is accessing the API but it's doing that so it is taxing Disney's servers but it knows exactly what my Disney Experience knows so one Improvement to the tip board last year was that now it'll say you can book your next Genie plus lightning Lane at whatever time well standby Skipper grabs that information from My Disney Experience that's in the app as well so standby Skipper will tell you when the next time you can book is even if even if it's going to do it for you it's going to tell you when the next time is because of that and because the way we know how multiple experience passes work once you get a multiple experience pass it lets you book again I'm sure standby Skipper could book again too so you're not going to lose anything anything there got it so after having used it for several days I mean what kind of did you come away with who who is this for you said maybe it's not for us but maybe or maybe it is under certain limited circumstances so who do you think would get the most value out of this purchase yeah I think the most value is going to be had from beginners who understand Genie plus decently well but haven't had the experience of like using it day in day out to like kind of get the Nuance for the field of it's I mean it's a it's a finicky system we know this right gen plus is not perfect by that is probably the understatement of the year it is it's it's just not it's not that simple to use if you have a good understanding of just the basic concepts of Genie plus and you're a beginner and you don't want to like deal with the stress I think this is a great I mean it's only $45 investment if you've paid $200 for Genie Plus for five days like a thousand dollar for your family of five okay it was that was too much but you know you're spending hundreds of dollars on G Plus right an extra $45 at that point is very close to being a drop in the bucket and so for beginners I think it would be very useful but I can't reiterate this enough you do have to have or to at least get good use out of it you should have a good understanding of how Genie plus works I mean I guess the other way you could use it is you could just take every ride you want and then put them all under as soon as possible and then just let standby Skipper give you whatever it gives you and kind of knowing that if you put 10 rides down you only get to six or seven I mean honestly that's probably a perfectly good way to use it and you'll get to do you know quite a bit so for beginners it's good for people who are more advanced I was talking to another Disney friend lesie who's really good with Gen plus and she said the same thing she's like I use standby Skipper I'm probably better than it but using standby Skipper saved me some time and I didn't have to like worry about it as much so even if you're Advanced and you know the genie plus 2 a one tricks another episode you can find in our previous podcast youtube.com/ disne deciphered but even if you have all those skills the really nice thing on this trip was I was just so busy with stuff I was like this is the perfect trip for me to test out standby Skipper just see what it'll get for me and then I'll just you know I'm not my trip's not ruined if I miss any attraction except for the people mover but standby Skipper can't get that for me anyway right so let me just let it get what it can get and so that worked perfectly well and so that is another use case if you want to spend time with your family and not with your phone definitely worth checking out standby Skipper and then kind of the last thing I would say is that if you have Genie Plus for like a lot of days over your trip like over the course of 7 days I know that this is Sun cost fallacy and that this is not really how e Economics work but it feels better spreading that $45 standby Skipper cost over four or five days than you know just using it for two for sure or if you can share it with somebody else who's friend who's on the same spring break as you are then you know more power to you if you can make it work that way as as well so you know I'm just sort of thinking back to like when this would be most helpful to me and you know back when I was traveling with babies and toddlers and like hands being free that was very hard or I was easily distracted you know it could easily miss a time even with an alarm that would be very very helpful I mean now that my kids are bigger I can be like guys I'm booking a lightning Lane you know be quiet give me a second but I I think for folks who are kind of overwhelmed by the circumstances of like their family especially if you're the pressure is all on you because I feel that sometimes if I'm going with a group and it's like lesie get us the perfect itinerary like no nobody else bothers to learn it it's all on me like I'm worried about my phone messing up or something like that have you heard anything speaking of messing up about standby Skipper having issues at some certain points in time I mean I presume it's dealing with Disney it so if Disney it is down it's down but other than that I think the beauty of standby Skipper is you kind of don't know how the sausage is made and so I'm sure there are times where it like misses something but it probably doesn't cause such a backup that like people don't realize like you just don't have to time to realize like maybe it's 10 or 15 because it is later than you would be when I was doing that afternoon stack it didn't grab my second lightning Lane for the afternoon until 11:13 a.m. which is 13 minutes later than I would have grabbed it myself right so these things happen like it's not like I said it's not searching every single instance but that being said I think like overall the whole point is to not look at your phone and to not worry about it so you kind of aren't going to notice if the there's like a little bit of a hiccup here or there I I should also say that one thing that finally convinced me to try this out aside from the multiple listeners and clients who asked me about it is I had a friend who there were they were that friend Lesley who was like Hey I'm going to Disney World next week do you have any advice and next week was Christmas so it was it was a serious time so we talked a little bit and I got her ready for a trip but she ended up buying standby Skipper and she said that it really made things feel better at Christmas so I I guess I would say another use case is during the super busy times spring break is coming up things like that standby Skipper is probably going to save you some stress if even for people like us if only for the reason that we just won't be constantly modifying and trying to maximize everything we're just going to let someone else do it fair enough fair enough well hopefully this episode is not already obsolete by the time we're going to be releasing it but why don't we close this out with our Disney do or don't what do you have for us Joe yeah so my Disney do is if you're going to use standby Skipper still do some research to decide what attractions to prioritize I like I said really having at least a basic understanding of Genie plus and which attractions book up first which are ones that you can save for later that's really going to help you to come up with your list to give standby Skipper and to decide when to ask it to find what attractions like I said the easy version is you just throw all the attractions in there and get what you get but if you want to be a little bit more efficient get to things a little bit faster and have a little like you know squeeze out that extra ride or two then you're really going to only want to search for two to four rides at a time and you want to know which rides do I need to prioritize which rides do I do second tier third tier stuff like that okay Joe well thanks for trying this out for us yeah and if you have tried this out or if you have any questions you can email us anytime Disney disy decipher gmail.com tweet us at ww decipher on Twitter or find us on Instagram Disney deciphered and of course you can also find us on YouTube now youtube.com/ Disney deciphered please like And subscribe there that'll do it for this standby Skipper episode so thank you everyone for taking the time to listen to us and other than that lesie thank you for taking the time to talk to me and I will see you trying this out at your next Walt Disney World vacation thanks Joe oh by the way not available for Disneyland [Music] yet

Channel: Disney Deciphered

Views: 6,542

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Id: SMxABsYzG-s

Length: 28min 48sec (1728 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 14 2024