2024 Disneyland Crowd Calendar Retrospective

We’re almost to the end of January, and that means that we need to wrap up all of our crowd calendar retrospectives so that we can start looking forward to the year ahead! We’ve already reviewed the results from Walt Disney World, and from Universal Orlando. That leaves us with Disneyland. How did the Touring Plans predictions fare compared to actual crowds on the west coast?

Explain the Math!

If you take a peek at the Disneyland 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 California 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 Disneyland 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 an ideal world, that green bar in the middle of each column would be 100% every year. Touring Plans would have perfect predictions that matched reality, everyone would trust them all of the time, and we’d all be so happy. The problem is … this isn’t an ideal world. Humans are unpredictable. And humans make the operational decisions for Disneyland, and humans are the ones that decide whether to visit Disneyland 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.

In a lot of ways, 2024 was a pretty great year, especially compared to other post-pandemic years. TouringPlans had the highest level of accuracy since the pandemic, tied with 2021. But while that year had an almost equal number of over-predictions and under-predictions, each of the years since have exhibited “pendulum behavior” (a term I used in last year’s retrospective). 2022 had more underpredictions than overpredictions, and 2023 swung totally the opposite direction with very few underpredictions and a lot of overpredictions. 2024 swung right back to having almost 30% of days be underpredictions and fewer than 15% of days having overpredictions.

2024 Performance Compared Across Parks

In order to understand what went right (or wrong) in 2024, 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 Disneyland, compared to Disney World, since there are only two parks.

We can pretty quickly see that predictions for Disneyland were more “off” than those for California Adventure – which is similar to what happened last year. The green bar for Disneyland is slightly smaller (53% within 1 crowd level compared to 55%), but it has significantly more underpredictions. California Adventure is much more centered, while Disneyland has the bulk of those 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 that probably means you love the results. We’ll go with that.

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

California Adventure

Compared to last year, we’ve got fewer colors on this calendar. Yay! That’s a result of that higher overall accuracy number. And a couple of patterns start to emerge here too. Weekdays during January were higher than expected, but weekends were emptier. Then there was a week in February where the whole place emptied out. Everyone decided to go during the first full week of March, instead, when crowds were significant higher than expected. And April in general was more crowded than what was predicted.

The summer (I’m going to call May through September “summer” in California, okay? Okay.) was all over the place with no real trends, but a bunch of scattered over- and under-predictions. This is what we would hope the entire year would look like.

And then things wrapped up with October, November and December all turning pretty purple with significantly more overpredictions. We’ll see if this trend of lower wait times continues into 2025!

Disneyland

This calendar is very different from the one above. Specifically, much more orange. The only significant groupings of overpredictions (purple boxes) happen in weekends in January, some of February, and sprinkled in October/November.

Otherwise, Disneyland was much more crowded in general than TouringPlans predicted it to be this year. That is true March through June. August, September and November each have interesting groupings of big orange blotches. They happen Monday-Thursday (or Monday-Wednesday in November). We don’t see the same cooling-off of crowds here at the end of the year as we did in California Adventure.

Did you experience any of these major overpredictions or underpredictions at Disneyland or California Adventure? Do you have any hypotheses about the trends in months that were much more or much less crowded than expected? Let us know below!