2024 Universal Orlando Crowd Calendar Retrospective

Welcome to the fourth week of 2025, when we’re finally getting around to reviewing how our crowd calendar predictions performed for the Universal Orlando parks. Because we need to be fair to Universal! We already reviewed Walt Disney World predictions extensively. And Universal is just as important, or so some of my good friends tell me. So let’s put on our Sorting Hats, eat a giant donut, drink a ridiculously-adorned chocolate milkshake and crunch those Universal numbers.

Explain the Math!

If you take a peek at the Universal Orlando 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 the 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 our predictions were.

In this case, I’ll subtract the predicted crowd level from the actual crowd level. For example, if we predict a crowd level 10 at Islands of Adventure, but the day ends up being a crowd level 8, the difference is -2. We overpredicted the crowds by 2. But if we predict a crowd level 4 at Universal Studios Florida and the day ends up being a crowd level 7, the difference is 3. We underpredicted the crowds 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 it’s best to avoid.

2024 Performance Compared to Previous Years

In a perfect world, that green bar would be 100% every year. Touring Plans would have ideal predictions that perfectly matched reality, everyone would use them reliably, and we’d all be best friends forever. The problem is … this isn’t a perfect world. Humans are unpredictable. And humans make the operational decisions for Universal Orlando, and humans are the ones that decide whether to visit Universal Orlando or not. Plus, Touring Plans tries to not change the predicted crowd levels constantly so that people planning have some stability. So there’s a lot working against perfect predictions. Even still, we all want 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 pleasantly surprised if the parks are less crowded than they expect (aka, Touring Plans overpredicted). And they’re unpleasantly surprised if the parks are more crowded than they expect (aka, Touring Plans underpredicted). But Touring Plans is full of math nerds, and nerds want distributions to be centered (aka, just as many underpredictions as overpredictions). Still, during a retrospective, I’m going to recognize and acknowledge that all of our lovely customers are going to be less full of rage if the stats folks can keep those underpredictions to a minimum.

2024 looks pretty good if we’re paying attention to the size of that green bar in the middle – certainly better than WDW did. Predictions were within one crowd level 66% of the time. That’s better than most of the past 5 years (just not last year). And things aren’t terribly skewed either. Bonus – they’re skewed in the “good” way. This year there were twice as many overpredictions as there were underpredictions.

2024 Performance Compared Across Parks

In order to understand what went right (or wrong) in 2023, we need a little more information. Let’s go down one level and look at how predictions performed at each park rather than the resort as a whole. This is significantly easier at Universal, compared to Disney, since there are only two parks (I’m excluding water parks from the conversation).

Unlike the last two years, no single park is responsible for most of the misses. Instead, both parks had pretty similar performance. Both green bars are within 5% of each other, which isn’t incredibly different. But, one park was more “skewed” than the other. At Islands of Adventure, Touring Plans overpredicted by 2 or more crowd levels 17% of the time, and underpredicted by 2 or more crowd levels 18% of the time. Not perfect, but pretty even. At Universal Studios Florida, Touring Plans only underpredicted by 2 or more crowd levels 11% of the time. On the other hand, we overpredicted by 2 or more crowd levels 28% of the time. Almost 3x as many overpredictions as underpredictions.

Calendar Retrospective of Crowd Calendars

What better way to review calendars than with more calendars?! I know I love making and coloring calendars in Excel. So so much. One of the biggest joys of my life. So that probably means you love the results. We’ll go with that.

I’ll start here with Universal Studios Florida, where predictions had the lowest accuracy, provide my commentary, and then move to Islands of Adventure. We can discuss park-specific issues, as well as trends that I notice affecting both parks.

This calendar looks very different than the ones we saw for Walt Disney World last week. So crowds showing up or not showing up aren’t affecting all Orlando theme parks equally compared to predictions.

The beginning of the year, and especially February, was more crowded that expected. But then things didn’t continue to outpace expectations during Spring Break season and April. Interestingly, the Spring-Break-Week-That-Wasn’t that we saw on every WDW calendar isn’t incredibly apparent at Universal Florida.

June and August were pretty empty compared to predictions, but July was almost spot-on (with the large exception being Sundays). Other than Mondays, September was also less crowded that expected. October and November were a pretty mixed bag, and then December emptied back out. Especially the week before Christmas.

Behavior at Islands of Adventure is actually pretty remarkably different than at Universal Studios Florida. In this case, the entire first four months of the year were quite a bit more crowded than predicted. The only notable exception is the Spring-Break-Week-That-Wasn’t that has three purple days in it.

But then after a well-predicted May, the entire summer was generally less crowded than predicted. Especially August. September and November evened back out, but October was empty compared to predictions (thanks, hurricanes and cancelled trips). The week before Christmas that was overpredicted at UF was fine at Islands of Adventure.

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