Disney Data Dump December 13 2023

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! That lovely in-between-time where the parks are all decked out for the holidays, but the miserable worst-crowds-of-the-year have not yet descended. If everything goes smoothly, it can be one of the best times of the year to visit the Walt Disney World parks. But this week, not everything went quite smoothly. Let’s find out how that impacted all of our favorite Disney data!

Observed Crowd Levels December 5 – 11

It’s another light week in the beautiful period between Thanksgiving and Christmas crowds! Everything is hovering right around average, preparing to leap up to higher crowd levels once schools start wrapping up their semesters.

But not everything is just boring and average! There are a few trends we can learn from. First, Magic Kingdom party day behavior continues to be strong. We’ve got a few more of the Thursday/Friday party day pairs before the end of the year, and so far, Thursday has always been less crowded than Friday. If you’re looking for the real pick of the week, I would go for Thursday. Also, the 6th represents a really weird blip for Hollywood Studios. That was a Jollywood Nights event night, but we haven’t seen that cause a huge dip in crowds … ever. It may be that the Magic Kingdom non-party day was so much of a draw that Hollywood Studios just couldn’t pull in the crowds.

Performance of Crowd Level Predictions

Each week, I’m giving you a very transparent look into how our crowd level predictions performed. Each day at each park is one data point, so we have 28 different crowd level predictions to evaluate each week. Any time a prediction is within one or two crowd levels, things won’t really “feel” much different than what we predicted. Being off by 3 or more crowd levels is where we’d like to be more accurate because you might feel that difference in wait times throughout the day.

In the past week, Touring Plans predictions were either spot-on or within 1 crowd level 57% of the time. Thankfully this represents a decent recovery from the past two weeks. 89% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, and that means we rebound to a B+ for our predictions the past week. Still, there are some important things to pick out from these results. The first is that we’re still skewed toward over-estimates. The average difference between predicted and observed crowd levels this week was -1, which means that on average you could have subtracted a full crowd level from every park-day estimate and you would have been more accurate.

Second, Hollywood Studios is a big outlier. Its average difference was -2.7 crowd levels for the past week. In fact, all of the five biggest misses of the week were each overestimated and were at Hollywood Studios. The biggest miss of all was on December 6th, when the predicted crowd level was 8 and ended up being a glorious 2 instead.

Attraction Downtime December 5 – 11

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 4.0% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s exactly in line with the two weeks before that. Hollywood Studios once again would up as the park with the most capacity lost throughout the week, averaging out to 4.7%.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on December 7th. On that day, 6% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. The worst park-day was at Hollywood Studios on December 5th. On that park day, 9% of the capacity was lost at the park due to unexpected downtime. Hollywood Studios was open for 12.5 hours on the 1st, so 9% downtime is the equivalent of the whole park being down for more than 67 minutes.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offenders

The worst offender of the past week was (brace yourself) Rise of the Resistance, which was unexpectedly down for 28% of the past week. That one hurts. And that’s after having a (relatively) stable November that “only” averaged 9% daily downtime. The worst day for Rise was December 5th, when the ride was down for 59% of the day. It didn’t open for the day until a little after 2 pm. On the 10th it didn’t come line until a little after 1 pm, and on the 11th it didn’t open until 2:45 pm. That’s some major morning and midday struggles. Spoiler alert – as I’m writing this article on the 12th, Rise was down until almost 11 am. It then came up for a few minutes before crashing again until 2:30 pm. It’s definitely a trend. Hopefully one that stops soon.

Rope Drop Downtime

Here are this week’s problematic offenders:

• Magic Kingdom: Big Thunder Mountain Railroad (unavailable for 33% of its first hour of the day), Barnstormer (unavailable for 21% of its first hour of the day)
• EPCOT: Test Track (unavailable for 25% of its first hour of the day)
• Hollywood Studios: Rise of the Resistance (unavailable for 53% of its first hour of the day), Muppet*Vision 3D (unavailable for 18% of its first hour of the day)
• Animal Kingdom: Expedition Everest (unavailable for 17% of its first hour of the day)

Let’s face it. Rise of the Resistance had a bad week. It was either up during rope drop, or it stayed down for about half of the day. And Test Track is back to its unreliable ways too. Big Thunder Mountain Railroad being down messes with crowd distribution at Magic Kingdom too. Altogether, not the greatest week for rope-drop plans.

Wait Times December 5 – 11

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Hollywood Studios: Rise of the Resistance, average posted wait of 95 minutes (84 minutes last week at Slinky Dog Dash)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 79 minutes (78 minutes last week)
• EPCOT: Frozen Ever After, average posted wait time of 69 minutes (65 minutes last week at Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure)
• Magic Kingdom: Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, average posted wait time of 63 minutes (65 minutes two weeks ago)

It’s a rare week when Rise of the Resistance has the top wait time at Hollywood Studios. Slinky Dog Dash has been taking that crown for months and months. But with all of the downtime, Rise had really high posted wait times when it managed to be online. Otherwise, things were pretty steady when compared to the previous week.

Parks with the Highest and Lowest Average Wait

These parks likely won’t change week-to-week unless something ridiculous happens, but these data points will give us a high-level view of how wait times are trending from week to week.

• Highest: Hollywood Studios, average park-wide posted wait of 38 minutes (43 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 26 minutes (27 minutes last week)

Look at that – still some nice, average park-wide wait times! Hollywood Studios had a surprisingly good week – even with Rise having all of its struggles.

Most Inflated Posted Wait Times

We all know that Disney inflates their posted wait times on purpose. They have many reasons for doing this. Some are totally understandable, and some are potentially more problematic. We can figure out how much posted wait times are being inflated by comparing submitted actual wait times from the Lines App and the posted wait time when the person timing their wait entered the line.

Over the past week, actual wait times in the Lines App averaged 62% of what was posted. This is slightly below our historical average, which means wait times are more inflated than “normal”. If the posted wait time was 60 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait just 37 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week is Test Track. At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were 42% of posted wait times in the past week. Oof. That means that if Test Track had a 60 minute posted wait, you probably would’ve waited just 25 minutes instead. Quite a bit less than half of what was posted. Remember to always check the Lines app for predicted actual waits instead of believing what is posted.

Actual Wait Time Rock Star

The Actual Wait Time Rock Star for the past week was … jrcoyne99, who submitted 54 actual wait times through the Lines App! This includes 3 Lightning Lane waits, 37 Standby waits, 8 Single Rider waits, and 6 virtual queue waits. Thank you for all of that timing, jrcoyne99! It’s not quite enough to take first place away from our all-time leader, TheFugitiveGuy.

In the upcoming week, any timed waits that you’re willing to give us during peak hours (11 am to 5 pm) would be incredibly helpful! We tend to get a bunch of people timing short waits in the morning during busy season … because you’re all smart.

Looking Ahead: December 12 – 18

We’re turning the corner into peak holiday season. This week was the calm before the storm. The upcoming weekend (16th through 18th) will be the beginning of families getting out of school and running away to Florida. That being said – this weekend is also looking like it might be a washout, which could keep wait times artificially lower until next week.

There are a few things to pay attention to throughout the week. First is that Thursday/Friday Magic Kingdom party day pair. Both will be relatively uncrowded, but usually Thursday is less crowded than Friday. Second – stay on the lookout for Rise of the Resistance downtime at Hollywood Studios. I can be oddly specific and say if Rise of the Resistance is down at the beginning of the day, you may want to hover in the area starting at 2 pm and jump right into line when it opens. Otherwise, wait times are going to be higher than usual thanks to all of that downtime.