How to Get Around Disneyland Lightning Lane Restrictions to Ride Your Favorites More Than Once

Disneyland Lightning Lane Multi Pass is a great timesaver to maximize your time at the parks, but the restriction that you can only book attractions once per day with the service can be a little frustrating for any super-fans of particular rides.

However, there are a few ways you can still ride your favorites more than once. As someone who would happily go on Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: Breakout! all day nonstop, I jump on the opportunity to get another ride (or more!) in by utilizing these tricks below.

Below, we'll share some of the best ways to get around the Lightning Lane Multi Pass restrictions to ride your favorites at Disneyland more than once without having to endure a long standby line! It's worth noting that most of these strategies require some degree of luck, but combining all of them can increase your odds of success.

Riding Via Standby With Morning Rope Drop

The reliably best strategy for experiencing your favorite ride more than once is to rope drop it in the morning. Before park opening, Cast Members will start letting people into the parks to line up at the various access points to the land that are blocked off by ropes. For this strategy to be most effective, you really want to arrive early so that you're one of the first groups lined up—we recommend being through security and at the front gate about 30-45 minutes before opening.

This is most necessary for some of the more popular Lightning Lane Multi Pass attractions at the parks like Space Mountain, Indiana Jones Adventure, Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: Breakout, etc. If you prioritize these first thing in the morning when the standby lines are shorter, you can then ride them again via Lightning Lane entry later.

Note that this strategy is specifically for Lightning Lane Multi Pass rides. We do not recommend rope-dropping the two Lightning Lane Single Pass rides, Rise of the Resistance and Radiator Springs Racers—we talk about this more in our Disneyland morning rope drop strategy and Disney California Adventure morning rope drop strategy.

Ride Via Standby In the Late Evening

If you feel up to staying up late, another strategy is to use Lightning Lanes earlier in the day and then ride your favorites again via the shorter standby lines in the later evening. This can be a great time to ride popular attractions (including Rise of the Resistance, but just note this closes at 10 pm each night!) with shorter standby lines than the rest of the day.

If you're willing to stay until park closing, you can get a lot accomplished in this later evening time! You can see our Disneyland evening strategy for more details and the ride order we'd recommend going in. In the article, our content director Lindsay mentions how even when visiting on a busy holiday during one Thanksgiving trip, she was able to ride Haunted Mansion Holiday three times in a row because there was barely anyone in the queue later in the evening!

Fish For a Multiple Experiences Pass

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This strategy requires some luck, but another option to ride your favorites more than once is to fish for a Multiple Experiences Pass. This is the “golden ticket” pass that you'll get if you have a ride reservation to a top-tier attraction at the park and it breaks down, which you can use on anything except Peter Pan and Rise of the Resistance. These passes don't have the same restriction of only being valid for use for each attraction once per day, so you can use them to ride your favorites again.

There are some attractions that are more prone to breakdowns or may not be ready to go first thing in the morning…the prime example is Indiana Jones Adventure. If you book this for your first reservation of the day, there is a chance you will get a Multiple Experiences Pass if the ride is down.

Another strategy is to book a Lightning Lane return time for a ride you see is temporarily closed, especially if that return time is coming up soon. If it's still closed when your return window arrives, you will get a Multiple Experiences Pass. We talk about this, and an example of this in action, in our YouTube video here on Lightning Lane Multi Pass (from when it was still called Genie+).

I've had a lot of luck with this strategy and always love to use my Multiple Experience passes to get my fill of Mission Breakout!

Take Advantage of Large Groups

Another tip if you're traveling with a bigger group is to make Lightning Lane reservations for everyone even if not all of the people in your group want to ride. If you have a few people who want to sit a certain attraction out, rather than leaving them off of the reservation, go ahead and make it for everyone so that any super-fans in your group can take advantage of the extra reservation to ride twice in a row.

Wait Until a Temporarily Closed Ride Reopens

While it is possible to keep an eye on a temporarily closed ride that has had a longer breakdown to see when it reopens for the shortest standby wait, this strategy is the trickiest on this list for a few reasons.

It's not always possible to predict when a ride will be up and running again, and even though the wait time will post an instant wait time of 5 minutes when it reopens after a long breakdown, guests can accumulate in the queue faster than the wait times on the app will reflect. You can see more discussion on whether the wait times at Disney are accurate here.

On a recent trip, I jumped on the opportunity to get in line for a just-reopened Space Mountain with a 10-minute posted wait only for a Cast Member to announce a few minutes in that it was a 40-minute wait from where I stood. There have been other times when I've happened to be passing by the entrance of a ride just as the Cast Member is reopening it and am among the first to walk straight on. All of this is to say that you always want to be vigilant about an opportunity to ride your favorites again, but make sure you also gauge the crowds outside a just-reopened ride to make sure you're not behind a horde of people rushing to get on.

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