Liquidice
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Mar 10, 2019
I was wondering the same thing. Can anyone go up and request a rider swap? If so that seems particularly rife for abuse.
For example, let’s say a group of adults with questionable morales wants to ride Slinky
Adult 1 says they need to rider swap, so their band gets scanned and Adult 2 joins the line.
A few minutes later Adult 2 leaves the line.
Adult 1 and “friend” enter the LL.
This works very neatly with any even number of riders. For odd number of riders, take turns being the one to “sit out."
Because the “friend” doesn’t even need to swipe in, they could immediately get off the ride and become the next “Adult 2.”
Repeat ad nauseum.
There needs to be some mechanism preventing the LL from being abused. The only reason why it works with traditional rider swap is that someone HAS to stay with the “baby,” so it is self policing.
Rider Switch exists today like I described it - so it could be abused right now I suppose.
The LL is only for 2 people though, so it is more difficult to abuse with large parties and someone in theory gets left out.
I guess if you had someone that never wanted to ride, they could be the one to pretend to go through the standby line while the other 2 people got a LL.
The way it works today is usually 1 person is waiting outside because they don't want to ride though - so that person would not get a LL or a standby.
It is easy enough to say my friend is scared of rollercoasters and doesn't want to ride SDD, so I'm waiting outside with my friend and my other friend is going through standby.
CMs usually won't issue a Rider Switch Lightning Lane to the person getting in the standby line. I suppose if there are only 2 of you, they might be willing to do that and then the other person could easily hop out of line.
Still, it limits your party in the LL to just 2. Yes maybe it could be abused, but it is a much smaller group and it would require a little more planning / walking to each attraction, setting up the RS, 1 person hopping out of line.
Remember, Disney's goal here is primarily to reduce the number of people in the Lightning Lane.
EDIT: Its still possible there will be a requirement to sign up for Disability Rider Switch or some modifications to Rider Switch. I obviously don't really know, just describing how Rider Switch works today and based on the Disneyland Accessibility Planning Guide trying to estimate how it would work in practice.
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