Early Entry Ending at Disneyland in 2026

It's about to get a lot harder to get that castle shot without a lot of people in it.

Starting January 5, 2026, Disney has announced that hotel guests at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim will no longer have access to the Early Entry perk that currently grants them 30 minutes of exclusive access to one of the two theme parks just prior to opening. Instead, guests at qualifying Disneyland hotels will be given a single Lightning Lane that can be used to book a Multi Pass attraction. In addition to ending Early Entry, Disney will also close the dedicated entrance to California Adventure that is currently available to guests staying at Pixar Place. Although it was located outside the Grand Californian, this special entrance was billed as a perk for Pixar Place guests and allowed entry into the Pixar Pier area of the park. Starting in 2026, Pixar Place guests may use the California Adventure entrance to the park, which enters into the Redwood Creek Challenge Trail area of Grizzly Peak.

Although the primary motivation for Disney to make these changes is likely cost (an extra hour of staffing costs for an entire theme park is far more expensive than tossing folks a free Lightning Lane), this will likely be a popular change for those guests who prefer to sleep in on their vacation. For other guests, however, the loss of thirty precious minutes of virtually crowd-free park time will be sorely missed. Even with the addition of a free Lightning Lane, guests who plan to pay for the full Lightning Lane service will gain little benefit since the Disneyland system does not allow guests to book Lightning Lanes until they enter the park. With early park admission, hotel guests had the first pick of all the most coveted Lightning Lanes when they entered the park thirty minutes early. It is unclear if the free Lightning Lane will allow an attraction to be pre-booked or if it will be subject to the normal limitations that require entry into the park before booking.

It is unlikely this change would come to the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida as the offering is very widely used in all four parks and is one of the largest motivators for guests to book an on-site Disney hotel stay. The benefit was not as widely used in Disneyland, which has far fewer hotels and tends to attract a larger local crowd that tend to visit the parks more frequently. Even though it is not as popular, the Early Entry benefit at Disneyland granted a special kind of magic that will be sorely missed: the experience of the park without all the people. Better get that crowd-free castle shot while you still can.