All-in-one Crowd Level Estimate
Walt Disney World has over 100 attractions and we use every one of them to produce a single, all-in-one crowd level estimate for the next 365 days in the future.
Thanks to our fabulous Disney World App users and our crack team of researchers, we collect wait times from every Disney World park, every hour of every day. These data - hundreds of thousands of individual wait times - are analyzed by a professional statistician, who looks for trends and patterns in the data to see how Disney World crowds are behaving.
Sorting The Marbles
Crowd Calendar 2.0 is based on a percentile rank (for more on why its dubbed "2.0", read here).
Imagine you have a box of 100 marbles of different sizes. If you sort the marbles from smallest to largest you can divide them into ten groups of ten, according to size. The largest ten marbles get put into Group Ten. The next ten largest get put into Group Nine, etc.
In our case, we are sorting all the possible crowd sizes at Disney World into ten groups. The highest ten percent get a rank of ten; the next highest ten percent get a rank of nine, etc.
What Do The Crowd Levels Feel Like In The Parks?
If you have dates planned, click on the "view park wait times" on the Crowd Calendar day page you're viewing, or by navigating to it from a park's wait times page (see Magic Kingdom's Wait Times page for reference). You'll be able to see predicted wait times for every attraction for every hour of the day.
If you haven't set your dates yet, or just want to see what the wait times look like in aggregate, visit the pages below to get a sense of how crowded each attraction will be:
How do the Crowd Levels relate to one another? Is a '6' day twice as crowded as a '3' day?
The Crowd Level numbers are ranked from 1 to 10, but each level does not represent a specific crowd size. Think of the Crowd Calendar as the Billboard Top 40 -- we rank the crowds just as they rank album sales. A '6' day may not be twice as crowded as a '3' day, just as the #6 album may not have half the sales as the #3 album.
What happened to the Magic Kingdom Mountains?
Our previous approach was to use the peak wait times at the Magic Kingdom Mountains (Space, Splash and Big Thunder) to predict crowd levels. This was popular and well understood, which helped us explain how the old calendar worked. The main disadvantage with the Mountains is that Disney can add and subtract ride vehicles at any time, varying the capacity of the ride and thus the amount of time people have to wait. Comparing the wait times of rides with variable capacity isn't the best we can do.
More questions?
Check out our Frequently Asked Questions page for the Crowd Calendar.
