2024 Crowd Calendar Retrospective: TouringPlans vs. Disney

Welcome to 2025! A totally new year, where we’re going to do many of the same things … like having fun with Disney Data (yes … again). One of our most popular articles from this time last year was a comparison of “crowd predictions” from Disney and Touring Plans. The basic idea is this: Disney gives us a peek into what they expect crowds to be like by adjusting their ticket prices. Higher ticket prices = higher expected crowds, and lower ticket prices = lower expected crowds. So now that 2024 is over, we can go back and compare actual results with what Disney “predicted” and with what Touring Plans predicted.

All of the Asterisks and Fine Print

As a data geek, I’ll willing admit that there is a lot of hand-waving here, behind what appears to be some fancy math. And I wouldn’t be doing my job if I wasn’t transparent about the hand-waving so that we can have fun with the results – without arguing over their statistical validity, etc.

• First, Disney changes its ticket prices in order to manipulate crowds. Technically, if ticket prices go way up, and crowds are lower, they have in some ways accomplished their mission. One of their goals is to have steady, even crowds throughout the entire year, so perhaps a more fair fight would be comparing our predictions to all the 5s, 6s, and 7s that Disney “hopes for”.
• Touring Plans predicts and records actual crowd levels based solely on wait times. Disney could have high ticket prices for, say, opening day of the Food & Wine Festival, because they expect large crowds. Those large crowds could descend upon EPCOT as expected. But if they’re all just eating and drinking and roaming and not getting into attraction lines, the actual crowd level we record won’t be all that high.
• Disney gets to control operations. This means that, if they need to (or want to), they can increase or decrease capacity, which in turn affects wait times, and therefore crowd levels. So this makes things slightly less “fair” because Touring Plans can’t do the same thing.

Data Preparation

Before I can compare results, I need to do some data wrangling. Comparing Touring Plans predictions to actual crowd levels is easy. They’re both on a scale of 1 to 10. We define how both are calculated. The Disney piece is more difficult. They had 12 different 1-day ticket prices for 2024 – just for Magic Kingdom – and they weren’t distributed quite like the bell curve that Touring Plans aims for. If we look at all of the combinations of MK/HS/EP/AK ticket prices things get even crazier. So for today we’re going to use the MK price as our analog for “Disney ticket prices”. Trust that I did all of the math in the background to ensure I wasn’t throwing away extra detail that we needed. I compared all of the different combinations and none of them differed significantly from this one – they’re just harder to visualize and explain.

Using math, I can bucket the 12 different price points to mirror the Touring Plans distribution as closely as possible. As you can see above, the results aren’t perfect. And that’s fine. Based on Disney’s ticket pricing, they were expecting more very-low and very-high crowd days than Touring Plans, and fewer moderate (5 and 6) crowd days than TouringPlans.

How Accurate Were the Predictions?

Before we get to the big fancy summary, let’s look at some physically bigger, fancier calendar-style heat maps. These calendars show the difference between the actual crowd level and the predicted crowd level. That means overpredictions are negative numbers (and will show up as purple) and underpredictions are positive numbers (and will show up as orange). Days that are off by only one level are considered to be “good enough” and aren’t colored in these charts.

One note for both calendars: parks were unexpectedly closed on October 10th due to a hurricane. That slot is blank on both calendars, but the weather and cancellations obviously impact the surrounding days too.

I like how the visuals can tell us a strong story here. Crowds were higher than ticket prices would suggest in the first 7 weeks of the year, las well as most of August and some weekdays in September. And they were significantly lower than ticket prices would suggest … almost all the rest of the year. Especially one Spring Break week in March, weekends in June, and lots of May, July, and October through December. In other words, you got a steal on your tickets if you traveled on any of those orange days. But if you attended on a purple day, you could have paid less for your tickets and had similar level crowds during other parts of the year.

The Touring Plans calendar is interesting too. More non-colored cells in general, especially in January, February, and September. But there are some other interesting trends too. That same Spring Break week was a bunch emptier than expected. But just like the Disney prices, things were emptier in the parks in June, July, and October through December.

How Do the Predictions Compare to Each Other?

These next graphs should look eerily familiar to anyone following along with the Disney Data Dump:

The results here speak for themselves. But you know me … I’m going to speak for them too 🙂

Last year (you can see those results here), Disney’s green wedge was 51% and Touring Plans’ was 71%. Both green wedges are smaller this year, and they’re closer in size to each other. Disney’s price “predictions” were off by at least 3 crowd levels 30% of the time. That’s more than last year. But Touring Plans also had more 3+ crowd level misses this year (14% compared to last year’s 10%).

Last year, Disney’s results were much less skewed than Touring Plans. They overpredicted 29% of the time and underpredicted 21% of the time. Because of the way those numbers are calculated, that means 29% of the time they were probably charging more than they should have, and that might have “scared” people away. But it also means that 21% of the time, they probably could have charged more and made more money. It looks like someone figured that out, because this year they overpredicted 42% of the time and underpredicted only 14% of the time. Or this means that Disney has finally reached their pricing limit and less people are showing up at higher price points.

What are your thoughts about these results? Is ticket price a serviceable corollary for what Disney thinks crowds will be like? Do you want to see more retrospectives on our predictions from 2024? Let us know in the comments!