Changes for Rise of the Resistance Virtual Queue
Changes for Rise of the Resistance Virtual Queue covers the newest changes to the Boarding Group process for the Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance attraction in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge in Walt Disney World.
If you’ve ever tried to get a boarding group for Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance in Galaxy’s Edge, you know that it can be quite the challenge. In fact, it’s such a detailed and involved process that we’ve even dedicated an entire article to breaking down the steps and giving our best tips to help you have a better chance at securing one of these highly sought after boarding groups at Hollywood Studios.
Well, today we have great news… thanks to a recent change, the process for trying to get a boarding group for Walt Disney World’s most popular attraction is now going to be a bit less complicated. Unfortunately, there’s still a real possibility that you won’t get a boarding group at all since ride capacity continues to be greatly limited and the demand is extremely high (check out our How to Get a Boarding Group for Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance post for more info on this), but this new change does remove one of the most difficult and nerve-racking elements of the process – getting into Hollywood Studios before official park opening time.
In the past, guests would need to actually scan their park ticket at the gates of Hollywood Studios and physically be inside the park prior to the park’s official opening time in order to attempt to secure a boarding group once they became available on the My Disney Experience app.
Now, according to Disney Parks Blog, guests will no longer need to be physically in the park or scan their ticket first. As long as you have a valid ticket and a Park Pass reservation for Hollywood Studios, you’ll be able to log into your My Disney Experience app and try for a boarding group that day as soon as they go live no matter where you are (UPDATE: At this time, the first round of boarding groups for the day go live at 7:00AM ET no matter what time the park officially opens).
Keep in mind that Disney does use the word “nearby“ when describing where a guest may be at the time of trying to secure a boarding group. We aren’t sure what this means for visitors staying off property or Annual Passholders who live in the Orlando area, but we are guessing that everyone will need to be somewhere on Walt Disney World property at the time that boarding groups become available for the day in order to try and secure one for themselves. (UPDATE: From what we’ve been hearing, it does seem that many people have been able to get boarding groups from off-property locations – even some nearby Florida locals have gotten them from home).
This really is a fantastic update since it removes one of the most unpredictable steps of the original process – getting inside the park on time – which in turn makes the entire process much less stressful overall. We’ve been hoping for a long time now that Disney would make this exact change to the Virtual Queue process, so we’re very happy about this new update.
These new changes go into affect beginning November 3, 2020. Everything else about the Virtual Queue and boarding groups appears to be staying the same at this time (including the fact that guests will need to be in Hollywood Studios in order to try for the second batch of boarding groups released at 2PM). If you want to know how Disney World’s Virtual Queue works, we’ve covered everything you need to know in our full guide, which you can find here:
On a side note, Disney’s latest tips for securing a boarding group interestingly states that “if multiple people in your party try to join the virtual queue simultaneously, that may complicate your ability to secure a boarding group“, so they suggest having only one member of your party try for a boarding group. This is the opposite of what we and countless others have suggested as the best strategy for securing a boarding group up until this point, which is to have everyone in your party with a My Disney Experience app try for a group at the same time. In fact, this is the only way that we have personally obtained a boarding group during more than one of our visits to Hollywood Studios in the past, as one of us was essentially locked out of the app and given error messages both times while the other was able to get a group. If we both hadn’t been trying for a boarding pass at the same time, we wouldn’t have gotten to ride.
So for now, we still think it’s probably a good idea to have at least a couple of people in your party try for a boarding group simultaneously just because the app is way too glitchy and unreliable. Remember that this is only a suggestion from Disney – not a requirement – so it may be that they are just trying to keep the app system from getting bogged down with too many people accessing it at once. If this is their reasoning, it does make sense, but because the app crashes so often and boarding groups are frequently gone within seconds of going live, it’s pretty risky to have only one member of your party try for a boarding group. It can be really disappointing if you miss out on the attraction because of an all-too-likely technical glitch, especially if you aren’t a frequent visitor to the parks. (If we find that anything changes with this, we’ll let our readers know, but at this time there doesn’t appear to be any change to the Virtual Queue system that directly affects the number of people in the same party that can attempt to get a boarding group at the same time.)
Disney has also announced that they have added a clear barrier between rows on the Rise of the Resistance ride vehicles, allowing them the ability to seat more than one party per vehicle. This is actually something that is already in place for several Walt Disney World attractions that have vehicles with multiple rows close together, such as DINOSAUR in Animal Kingdom, and we found that it seemed to work well overall and wasn’t terribly distracting in most cases. Adding these barriers to Rise of the Resistance vehicles will hopefully mean that more guests will be able to experience the attraction since this will allow them to slightly increase ride capacity for the day while still keeping parties separate to help maintain the current health measures.
Thanks for reading! That covers the most recent changes to Walt Disney World’s Virtual Queue system. Check out these articles for more updates and info about the Disney parks:
As always, we encourage you to visit Disney’s website for all official information and to make sure that none of this information has changed since this article was written. Disney frequently makes changes and updates to their parks and offerings. Because of this, the information in this post was current at the time of publishing and is subject to change at any moment. We update our website and articles as often as we can, but it is always a good idea to double check Disney’s official website before planning your trip or visiting the Walt Disney World Resort.
Last Updated on November 10, 2020