Disneyland Paris retired it’s free fast pass access in 2021, and replaced it with the new Disney Premier Access. The new service is a chargeable add on to your Disney park ticket.
What is Disney Premier Access?
Disney Premier Access is a chargeable add on to your park tickets. This service can be purchased in advance of your visit to the parks to help you save on time waiting in long lines.
What Attractions Can I use Disney Premier Access On?
The list of rides and attractions you can use Disney Premier Access for is Big Thunder Mountain, Peter Pan’s Flight, Ratatouille: L’Aventure Totalement Toquée de Rémy,Buzz Lightyear Laser Blast,Star Wars Hyperspace Mountain,Star Tours : l’Aventure continue,The Twilight Zone Tower of Terrorᵀᴹ and Autopia.
How Much Is Disney Premier Access?
Prices start from €5 per person per ride. This cost does depend on the day you visit the parks, and the crowds and time of year you are visiting.
How Does Disney Premier Access Work?
Log into your Disneyland Paris app and make sure your park tickets are linked to your account. When you’re in the park, you can select the ride you wish to purchase Premier Access for and you’ll be offered a time slot. If you don’t have a mobile phone, then you can purchase Premier Access from City Hall or Studio Services.
How Many Rides Can I Buy With Premier Access?
You may buy a maximum of 3 Disney Premier Access for each attraction per Guest per day. There is also a limit of 12 Disney Premier Access tickets for one attraction and one time slot at a time. Limited time slot tickets are available through the day.
If you’re feeling nostalgic, and wondering what it was like using the old Fastpass system at Disneyland Paris, then I have left our experiences and information below for historical reading.
The standard fastpass system at Disneyland Paris was a free service included in your park admission tickets. There were however other additional fastpass options that incurred charges that I talk about further down this post.
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Rides That Offered Fastpass at Disneyland Paris
Not every ride at Disneyland Paris had a fastpass option, but the options available were
- Big Thunder Mountain Railroad
- Hyperspace Mountain
- Peter Pan’s Flight
- Star Tours
- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril
- Buzz Lightyear Laser Blast
- The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror
- Ratatouille: The Adventure
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How Did The Standard Fastpass At Disneyland Paris Work?
To be able to use the fastpass queue on the selected rides at Disneyland Paris, you had to take your park admission ticket and scan one per rider against the fastpass machine located next to the ride you wanted to collect a fastpass for.
The fastpass machines showed you the current return time for you to ride with your fastpass ticket.
Your fastpass return time had a window of thirty minutes for you to use your ticket. You weren’t permitted access to the fastpass queue outside of the time on your ticket.
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There were only a selected amount of fastpasses available each day, and once they were gone, no more were issued.
We found that the more popular rides such as Big Thunder Mountain and Hyperspace Mountain tended to run out quicker than some of the other rides. For example, we collected a fastpass ticket for Big Thunder Mountain at 10.45am and our return time was for 1.45pm.
Technically you could only have one fastpass ticket at a time, however you were able to scan your park admission ticket and collect a new fastpass ticket when your first fastpass return time had passed, or two hours after you had collected your previous fastpass ticket.
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Disneyland Paris Hotel Fastpass
If you were staying in certain Disneyland hotels, there were additional fastpass options available. If you were staying in the Golden Forest rooms at Sequoia Lodge, Compass Club room at Newport Bay Club, you would have received an additional anytime use fastpass per person each day of your stay.
These fastpasses could be used on any of the fastpass enabled attractions any time during the day to suit you.
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Disneyland Paris Hotel VIP Fastpass
If you were staying in the suites or castle club rooms in either Disneyland Hotel, Disney’s Newport Bay Club and Disney’s Sequoia Lodge, you could take advantage of unlimited access to the Fastpass lines
Disneyland Paris Super And Ultimate Fastpass
The Super and Ultimate fastpass options at Disneyland Paris used to incur additional charges and could be purchased in advance to save you additional queueing time in the parks. This is similar to the introduction of Disney Premier Access
Super Fastpass allowed you one time access to a choice of three different rides for approximately £26 per person. These rides varied depending on whether you choose the family attractions option, or the big thrill attractions option.
An Ultimate fastpass allowed you one time access to all of the fastpass enabled rides and attractions for approximately £52 per person.
The unlimited Ultimate fastpass used to allow you unlimited access to all the fastpass enabled rides and attractions for approximately £105 per person.
In our experience, having travelled in a half term holiday where both the UK and the majority of French schools were out of school, we managed really well with just the standard free fastpass option.
We had decided which rides we wanted to use fastpasses on and made sure we were near that attraction when the park opened to all guests.
We were staying in Newport Bay, so had access to early magic hours each day. On our first day in the Disneyland Park, we queued for Peter Pan’s flight as this ride has long queues throughout the day.
Our Disneyland Paris fastpass strategy then began just before the park opened. We left one of our party to queue for a fastpass ticket at Hyperspace Mountain, whilst the rest of us rode some of the gentler rides that not everyone wanted to do.
With an early fastpass ticket for Hyperspace Mountain, we were able to collect our next fastpass ticket for Big Thunder Mountain for just after lunch.
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My biggest tip would be to familiarise yourself with the park layout as this helps when walking from one attraction to the next, helping you to collect fastpass tickets for the rides you really want to experience.
With the introduction of Disney premier Access, I would suggest looking at the rides you really don’t want to miss and weighing up the cost against waiting in ling lines. Is it worth it for your family?
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