2024 Disney World Crowd Calendar Retrospective

If you were paying attention last week, you know that I celebrated the new year by comparing Touring Plans predictions to Disney’s ticket costs “prediction” about crowd levels. This week I’m digging a little deeper and trying to determine how crowd calendar predictions performed compared to previous years and at the park level. All of this will help the stats team to make even better predictions in the future, and to help you make better plans throughout the 2025.

Explain the Math!

If you take a peek at the Walt Disney World crowd calendar, you’ll notice that each park-day is given a predicted crowd level on a scale from 1 to 10. Crowd level 1 days are the least crowded of the year, and crowd level 10 days are wall-to-wall humans everywhere you look. These are Touring Plans’ predicted crowd levels.

Then, after a park day happens, we can measure all of the wait times at every attraction in every park and determine what the actual crowd level was for that day. By subtracting the difference between the actual and the predicted crowd level, we can get an easy measure of how accurate those predictions were.

In this case, I’m going to subtract the predicted crowd level from the actual crowd level. For example, if Touring Plans predicted a crowd level 10 at Magic Kingdom, but the day ends up being a crowd level 8, the difference is -2. The crowds were overpredicted by 2. But if Touring Plans predicts a crowd level 4 at EPCOT and the day ends up being a crowd level 7, the difference is 3. The crowds were underpredicted by 3.

In general, you’re not going to feel any difference in your park day if predictions are off by just one crowd level. Within 1 crowd level is the goal. Really anything within 2 crowd levels I’ll call “fine”. Missing by 3 or more crowd levels is a big miss, and that’s the type of thing that should be avoided.

2024 Performance Compared to Previous Years

In an ideal world, that green bar would be 100% every year. Touring Plans would have perfect predictions, you’d love and believe them 100% of the time, and we’d all be best friends. In reality, things happen. The world is an unpredictable place. More to the point, Walt Disney World can change their operational decisions on a whim. Capacities, staffing, hours, etc. are all under their control. And the stats team tries to not change the predicted crowd levels constantly so that people planning have some stability. These operational changes have shifted into hyper-drive post pandemic, along with the unpredictability of human behavior. So there’s a lot working against stable predictions. Still, everyone wants that green bar in the graph to be as big as possible. And we especially want the red and pink bars (missed by 3 or more crowd levels) to be as small as possible.

What about the other bars? Well, in general, people are happier if the parks are less crowded than they expect (aka, Touring Plans overpredicted). And they’re more upset if the parks are more crowded than they expect (aka, Touring Plans underpredicted). But Touring Plans is full of math nerds, and math nerds want our distribution to be centered (aka, just as many underpredictions as overpredictions). Still, during a retrospective, I’m going to recognize and acknowledge that all of you are going to be less angry if those underpredictions are kept to a minimum.

2024 wasn’t great. In most ways, it was the worst prediction year since the pandemic. In 2024, Touring Plans predictions were within 1 crowd level just 56% of the time. The next-worst year was 2022, when it was 58%. But unlike 2022 when overpredictions and underpredictions were relatively balanced, 2024 predictions were wildly skewed toward overpredictions. This is great news for those of you in the parks this year. They were much, much less crowded than they could have been. But it’s bad for accuracy and predictability. In fact, if you had subtracted 1.5 or 2 crowd levels from predictions for almost the entire year, you would’ve been more accurate. Almost half of the time, crowd levels were 2 or 3 levels below what was predicted.

2024 Performance Compared Across Parks

In order to understand what went right (or wrong) in 2024, we need a little more information. In this article we’ll go down one level and look at how predictions performed at each park rather than the resort as a whole.

We can quickly see that EPCOT is the park that the predictions got “most right” in 2024. Touring Plans predictions were within 1 crowd level 62% of the time. And Magic Kingdom is where there was the most trouble in 2024 – predictions were only within 1 crowd level 40% of the time.

At least Magic Kingdom wins for least “skewed” predictions. At that park in 2024, Touring Plans overpredicted by 2 or more crowd levels 51% of the time, and underpredicted by 2 or more crowd levels 9% of the time. That’s obviously not centered at all. But all of the other parks were much more skewed, with a maximum of 2% overpredictions. At Hollywood Studios, we see the most “skewed” predictions. Touring Plans only overpredicted crowd levels once, and that was by 2 crowd levels. On the other hand, we underpredicted by 2 or more crowd levels 56% of the time. Underpredicting by that much over half of the time is rough. But it makes for a nice pleasant “surprise” in the parks if you were planning on longer lines.

Calendar Retrospective of Crowd Calendars

What better way to review calendars than with more calendars?!

I’ll start here with the park where predictions had the highest accuracy, provide my commentary, and then move to the next park. We can discuss park-specific issues, as well as trends that I notice affecting multiple parks.

When Touring Plans overpredicted crowds, those days turn purple. And when predictions make people angry by underpredicting crowds, those days turn orange. The darker orange, the angrier the people.

EPCOT

In 2022, right when the Festival of the Arts kicked off, crowds begin heading to EPCOT at a rate that was much higher than predicted. Then in 2023, the predictions overcorrected and expected more people than actually showed up. This year – if nothing else – we can say that predictions got the Festival of the Arts right. Huzzah!

Spoiler alert: we’re going to see the Spring-Break-Week-That-Wasn’t in every graph here. For me, this was the first sign that 2024 was going to empty out. Florida spring break the week before? Crowded. My kids’ spring break (and same for a lot of schools in the midwest)? Empty. People weren’t travelling to Orlando. This really became apparent in June, July and August at EPCOT. Food and Wine helped bolster things back to “normal” in September, but hurricanes happened in October.

Especially interesting to me is the last week of November – this is when we went back to “Diet EPCOT” with no festivals for a week … and so no one bothered to go to EPCOT. Otherwise, this was the park that stayed closest to predictions throughout the year. Thanks, drinking around the world!

Animal Kingdom

Already we can see that Animal Kingdom has fewer white-colored days than EPCOT. January and February were a missed bag with overall decent predictions, but then things shift when we hit the Spring-Break-Week-That-Wasn’t. After that, April was less crowded than expected (except on Fridays?).

June and August had spotty overpredicting, but July was much less crowded that it was predicted to be. Other than on the weekends – maybe locals like relaxing at AK when they’re off work. And once the weather started cooling off, so too did the AK crowds. October, November, and December all have a whole lot of purple. Which is good if you want to be pleasantly surprised by the wait time at Flight of Passage, but bad if you bought LLSP for Flight of Passage because you thought it was going to be crowded … but then it wasn’t.

Hollywood Studios

Ah, Hollywood Studios. Remember, this was the most “skewed” park, and we can see it in the coloring here. It was the most skewed last year too – almost all overpredictions, just like this year. Except this year there are many more of them.

This calendar also has our biggest miss of the year – which is an overprediction of 8 crowd levels on October 9th. That’s not really fair since that is a hurricane-impacted date. But there are also three different overpredictions of 7 crowd levels, on June 5th and December 18th and 19th.

In fact, starting in June, the crowd level was an average of 2.6 levels lower than what was predicted, every day. Another new trend this year that wasn’t captured well by the predictions was crowd levels dropping on Jollywood Nights … days. This year, that event started an hour earlier, which meant the park closed an hour earlier. Day guests could still see Fantasmic, but that extra hour seems to have been a deal-breaker that shifted overall behavior. On those 13 days, the park was an average of 4.8 crowd levels lower than it was predicted to be. Ouch. Once again, Good for those of you who caught the trend and used it to your advantage. Bad for planning based on those predictions.

Magic Kingdom

At Magic Kingdom, predictions were only within 1 crowd level 40% of the time. This is represented by all of the overall lack of white days on the calendar.

We start off with an interesting January and February compared to the other three parks. All other parks were somewhat on track with their predictions in the first two months of the year, but Magic Kingdom was running hot! This may be an overreaction to Magic Kingdom being much less crowded than expected in late January 2022 and 2023.

But then once we hit the Spring-Break-Week-That-Wasn’t, Magic Kingdom starts looking like most of the other parks. Aka, very purple most of the time. That’s true from April through August. But let’s have a cheer for September, which was nearly perfect for three whole weeks!

In the fall we see the return of my favorite crowd trend – “Magic Kingdom party day behavior” On party days, the Magic Kingdom closes early so that party guests can enjoy the more-empty-ish park that they paid to experience. That means that regular day guests tend to avoid these days and instead go to Magic Kingdom on other surrounding days that have longer operating hours. Which makes sense, if you don’t think about ALL of the other humans making the same decision. What ends up happening is that party days have much lower crowds, and non-party days that are sandwiched in-between two party days have much higher crowds. We know this phenomenon exists, and the crowd calendar got it wrong a lot in 2022 and 2023. Predictions adjusted a bit this year to get closer, but still missed a couple of sandwiched “non-party days” that had large crowds.

A Note About 2024

Looking at all of the calendars as a whole, it’s pretty clear that predictions started getting reliably higher than actuals in May or June. We need to keep in mind that the DAS revamp happened at the end of May 2024, and Lightning Lane Multi-Pass replaced Genie+ in late July 2024. The combination of these two policy changes undoubtedly had an impact on standby wait times, which is what feeds crowd level calculations.

Without getting into the “politics,” the results of the DAS revamp very clearly meant that many, many fewer people were using Lightning Lanes. That speeds up standby lines and makes those waits shorter. And Lightning Lane Multi-Pass re-introduced “tiers” for advance selections. In the Genie+ era, people were getting and using reservations disproportionately for headliner attractions and not the less popular ones. Tiering of advance selections means that more people are using Lightning Lanes at those secondary attractions instead of just headliners, which spreads them out, also helping standby waits go down overall.

As many of you have written to me, crowds in the parks still feel pretty heavy. But since crowd levels are based on standby wait times, and those policy shifts have decreased those standby waits, crowd levels go down even if “feels like” doesn’t go down.

Did any of the results of this retrospective surprise you? Were you at Walt Disney World for any of the significant overpredictions or underpredictions? Let me know in the comments!