What Happens When You're LATE for Your Tiana's Bayou Adventure Virtual Queue in Disney World?

There’s a NEW ride in Disney World!

Tiana’s Bayou Adventure

Tiana’s Bayou Adventure recently opened in Magic Kingdom, and it has been pretty popular since, with fans flocking to the ride to see how Disney overhauled Splash Mountain with a Princess and the Frog theme. To help manage some of those crowds, Disney decided to operate Tiana’s Bayou Adventure with a virtual queue. But what happens if you’re LATE for your return time? We tested it out!

To catch you up a little, there are currently two ways to ride Tiana’s Bayou Adventure — you can either join the free virtual queue through the My Disney Experience app, or you can book a Lightning Lane through the paid Genie+ service (which is, coincidentally, changing on July 24th).

Tiana’s Bayou Adventure Lightning Land and virtual queue line

But for the purposes of this article, we’re going to focus on that first method — the virtual queue. The virtual queue opens up twice per day, at 7AM and 1PM, and it typically fills up FAST. (The morning queue is usually gone within seconds and the afternoon queue may be almost that popular as well.) So if you’re planning on trying to ride by joining the queue, you’ll want to set alarms on your phone to make sure you don’t miss those drops.

Tiana’s Bayou Adventure

If you make it into the queue, you’ll be assigned a boarding group number. The boarding groups are then called back in numerical order, so it may take a few hours before you get “called” to the ride. It’s a good idea to have your notifications turned on for the My Disney Experience app so that you don’t miss your turn. From the moment your boarding group is called, you have one hour to make your way to Tiana’s Bayou Adventure and get in the queue.

Tiana’s Bayou Adventure queue

This is where things get tricky — what if you’re late? What if you have a dining reservation or you did some Park Hopping and it’s going to take a while to get to the ride? Or what if you don’t have a reason for being late at all? Will they still let you in? We endeavored to find out.

Tiana on Tiana’s Bayou Adventure

We sent two of our reporters to try being late on different days and see what happened. Both times, they returned well after their 1-hour return window had passed, and attempted to scan into the queue for Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. And both times, our reporters were let in the queue without question, even though they were late.

On the ride

Now, keep in mind that just because it happened to us twice, doesn’t mean that it’s Disney’s official policy. It’s possible that this could vary depending on the day, the crowd levels, or even the Cast Member who’s operating the entrance. Ultimately, though, we do have a bit of hope that Tiana’s Bayou Adventure will be more flexible with return times.

New outfits!

You see, when Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind opened with a virtual queue in EPCOT, we were able to scan into the ride HOURS later than our return time without penalty — and that happened over and over. But then, TRON Lightcycle / Run opened last year in Magic Kingdom with a much stricter policy. We went on to discover that the reason TRON was so strict is because the ride lights up at night, leading many to believe that it was better to ride in the evening. Because of this, Disney had to crack down on the return time for that ride specifically so that people didn’t crowd the queue after dark.

TRON queue

However, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure doesn’t offer any distinct advantage or difference when riding in the evening, so it makes sense that they can be more flexible with this ride. We’ll see if that changes in the future, but for now, we’d recommend trying it out anyway if you’re accidentally late for your queue. It doesn’t hurt to ask just in case!

Tiana’s Bayou Adventure queue

There you have it — our experience with being late to our virtual queue! We hope this helps you during your vacation and that you continue to follow along for more tips and Disney news!

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