Hi Alison!
Welcome to planDisney! I’m so glad you’ve stopped by with your question. I am all about planning well in advance and it looks like you are wisely already looking at next year!
Summer is the perfect time of year to cool down from the Florida heat with lots of splashtastic fun either at your
Disney Resort Collection Hotel or a Disney Water Park. Disney’s Blizzard Beach is currently open and you’ll find enough to occupy an entire day or even more than one day!
It is important to understand that there is a difference between a theme park and a water park and their ticket. A water park ticket does not need a Disney Park Pass Reservation as you mention, but more importantly to your question, does not have anything to do with park hopping. You can only “hop” between theme parks, and Disney’s Blizzard Beach is not a theme park. So when you start the day at a water park and then go to a theme park, you are not hopping. This also means you would use two admissions for that day, one water park admission and one theme park admission if you had a US-based ticket. If you will have one of the
special tickets sold only in the UK that include unlimited admissions for a specific number of days you wouldn’t need to worry about keeping track of your number of admissions.
You will want to make a
Disney Park Pass Reservation for whichever theme park you plan to enter first that day after you leave the waterpark. It doesn’t matter if it is before 2 PM or after, but you must enter the theme park you have the reservation for first, before you can hop to a different theme park. Let’s say you plan to head to Epcot after Blizzard Beach and have a Park Pass Reservation for Epcot. You can enter Epcot before 2 PM because you aren’t hopping. Epcot is the first theme park you are visiting that day. If you wait until after 2 PM you will still visit Epcot first because again, you aren’t hopping and it is the first theme park of the day. Once you have been to Epcot, you can hop to a different theme park after 2 PM.
This scenario shouldn’t have any effect on your
Genie+ selections. Know that when you go to make your Genie+ selections you don’t get to choose any time of day you wish when the options open in the morning, you must choose the next available time that is offered. So if we go back to our scenario from earlier, if you plan to visit Epcot in the afternoon and you’d like to ride Test Track at 3 PM, when you check Genie+ in the morning you may see the available Lightning Lane is for 10 AM. You will have to wait for other Guests to select that attraction and for the time offered to roll forward. Once you see the time for the Genie + Lightning Lane to reach a time you like, then you would select it.
I hope this helps and I didn’t make it more confusing. Please feel free to send me additional questions about this Alison, I am here to help!
- Kate