It was announced earlier this year that Disney World’s Tiana’s Bayou Adventure and Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind would cease using the virtual queue system on February 25, 2025. This followed a similar previous announcement in September 2024 for Tron Lightcycle Run. This means there are currently no rides at Disney World using virtual queue for the first time in years and every attraction will have standby lines available. It also ends the stress for many of waking up at before 7am on the morning of a Disney vacation and feverishly hitting the refresh button to try to get a boarding group to ride the lastest Walt Disney World rides sometime that day without paying extra. Virtual Queue was the only “free” way to ride without paying for a Lightning Lane Single Pass, which could cost $100 or more for a family on top of a regular Lightning Lane Multi Pass (formerly Genie+).

For your average family this is a great thing as I think this will remove some of the stress that many face on their rare Disney vacations. Families were sometimes faced with the fact that if they couldn’t get a Virtual Queue slot or Lightning Lane Single Pass, there was was effectively no way to experience some attractions no matter how long they were willing to wait. The Virtual Queue also just let you join the standard line where with Virtual Queue you still often had a 30-60 minute wait once your boarding group was called, similar to a standby wait on other attractions. Standby lines can still be long and vary dramatically based on the day or even within a day, but if you’re willing to wait you can ride. Note” I’m not sure why Disney appears to hyphenate “Standby” to “Stand-By”.

Disney’s use of Virtual Queue likely initially had more to do with working out the kinks of new rides than with crowd control. Virtual Queue was just a boarding group without a specified time (although estimates were sometimes provided), so it was often hard to predict when your turn to ride might be. However, this worked to Disney’s advantage as if a ride was having technical issues they could simply stop calling new groups until the line cleared and/or the issue was resolved without having a huge standby queue as well. I’m sure the extra dollars from Lightning Lane Single Passes didn’t hurt either from the “once in not very often” guests who had “FOMO” and felt compelled to pay when they couldn’t land a Virtual Queue. Also, a Virtual Queue was not a guarantee to ride, as mentioned in the fine print, in case a ride had an extended closure. Virtual Queue is not limited to Disney as Universal used it at Epic Universe for a short period during previews for Harry Potter Battle at the Ministry when it was having technical challenges.

After the removal of Virtual Queue the wait times for these attractions seem quite reasonable. The graphs below are from great data site Thrill-Data.com and shows each of the 3 rides have hovered around 70-80 minutes since its removal from Virtual Queue. There are expected spikes for holidays, but for the most part things have been stable. This is probably helped by the fact that all 3 rides have relatively large hourly capacity. Cosmic Rewind can handle around 2,000 riders/hour while Tron approaches 1,700 riders/hour and Tiana’s is about 1,200 riders/hour.

Other than using it for special events like the holiday overlay of the Haunted Mansion, it may be a while before we see Virtual Queue at Disney again with my guess being it will be for the “Door Coaster” at the new Monsters, Inc. land at Disney Studios. This attraction appears to provide the mix of a ride that will be very popular upon opening, but will also use some new technology that could cause some initial operation’s headaches. There is no date announced for this or any of the new Disney attractions as of yet, not even really an estimate, so it may be a few years before the return of Virtual Queue. Who knows, maybe by then Disney will have yet another way of doing crowd control and ride access as we’ve seen with the evolution of FastPass to Genie+ to Lightning Lane, so you never know I guess. I imagine most guests are happy it’s gone and current wait times seem reasonable for the attractions, so other than perhaps a bit of lost Lightning Lane Single Pass revenue for Disney, its removal appears to be a win all the way around.