Disney Data Dump October 14 2024

Some day the Disney Data Dump isn’t going to feel like a lengthy exclamation of how weird the low crowds are. But today isn’t that day. This week we get to review a full park closure, and see the impact of impending hurricane, hurricane happening, and hurricane leaving on crowd levels plus attraction downtime. What should have been one of the busiest weeks of the fall with plenty of schools having spring break instead turned into an oddly empty week with plenty of low wait times for whoever still happened to be in Orlando. Let’s see what it looked like:

Observed Crowd Levels October 8 – 14

Spoiler alert: this is not a normal crowd level graph for mid-October. A few weeks ago I predicted we’d be steadily up in the crowd level 7ish zone by this week. But hurricanes happen, and we’re seeing the impact of that this week. The parks were closed on 10/10 (side note – that’s my birthday, so I’m just pretending Disney opted for an exceedingly rare crowd level zero to celebrate with me). But even in the following four days, things haven’t fully recovered back up to normal thanks to a bunch of cancelled vacations.

This view helps us to see some of the recovery in crowds happening that should continue through next week. EPCOT is a really good example of this – going from a crowd level 3 on the 11th, up to 5, 6, and then finally 7 on the 14th. It should level off somewhere around there. Magic Kingdom crowds are going to continue to be very spiky too, with four parties every week.

Performance of Crowd Level Predictions

Each week, I give you a very transparent look into how the TouringPlans crowd level predictions performed. Each day at each park is one data point, so this week we only have 24 different crowd level predictions to evaluate thanks to a day-long closure. Any time a prediction is within one or two crowd levels, things won’t really “feel” much different than what was predicted. Being off by 3 or more crowd levels is where 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 8% of the time. A new low, but for obvious hurricane reasons. And, 21% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, and that means we get an F for our predictions in the past week. There’s not much to be done about that or learned from it. Crowds were supposed to be arriving for fall break, and a hurricane arrived instead. That means a lot of really big overpredictions. The biggest miss of the week was an overprediction by 7 crowd levels, at Hollywood Studios on the 9th, when a crowd level of 8 was predicted, but the park closed early and was empty at a crowd level 1.

Attraction Downtime October 8 – 14

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 5.8% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That excludes the times where the entire resort was shut down on Wednesday and Thursday. That’s up significantly from the past several weeks, and is above our historical average. Magic Kingdom was the park with the most overall downtime issues, coming in at 7.7% overall downtime over the past week.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on October 11th. On that day, 9% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. And the worst park-day of the week was also on October 11th, at Animal Kingdom (which is weird, because other than this one day, there was almost no downtime at the park). On the 11th, 20% of the capacity was lost at Animal Kingdom due to unexpected downtime. The park was open for 12 hours on the 11th, so 20% downtime is the equivalent of the whole park being down for almost 2.5 hours. A lot of this was due to Kali River Rapids being offline all day, and the Dinoland attractions being down for a significant portion of the day. Animal Kingdom has a lot of trees and vegetation, so recovering from the hurricane took some more effort there compared to other parks.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offenders

We’re switching over to a reliably unreliable classic this week – Pirates of the Caribbean was the WDW attraction with the worst overall downtime. This week, Pirates was unexpectedly down for 25% of the week. That’s a bad week. The worst day for Pirates was very clearly on October 11th, when the ride was down for 100% of the day. And the next day it was still down until a little after 1 pm. Other than the one big extended downtime, Pirates had an otherwise reliable week.

Rope Drop Downtime

Here are problematic offenders from the past week, with the percentage of downtime during the first hour of the day in parentheses:

• Magic Kingdom: Pirates of the Caribbean (43%), Seven Dwarfs Mine Train (40%), Space Mountain (38%), Winnie the Pooh (36%), Under the Sea (34%), The Barnstormer (26%), Buzz Lightyear (17%), Mad Tea Party (16%)
• EPCOT: The Seas with Nemo (46%)
• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash (33%)
• Animal Kingdom: Kali River Rapids (17%)

Well what a weird week. If you tried to rope drop at Magic Kingdom, I apologize on behalf of all of the attractions there. Just no good reliable options other than Peter Pan’s Flight. Thankfully, all of the other parks had relatively great weeks with almost no issues.

Wait Times October 8 – 14

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 65 minutes (58 minutes last week)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 53 minutes (48 minutes last week)
• EPCOT: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, average posted wait time of 54 minutes (54 minutes last week)
• Magic Kingdom: TRON, average posted wait time of 56 minutes (65 minutes last week)

Last week was weird, this week was weird – so we’re not learning much from these wait times other than things were out-of-the-ordinary low last week, and they continue to be that way this week. I expect all of these to rebound higher next week. Unless another hurricane pops up.

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 29 minutes (28 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 19 minutes (18 minutes at Animal Kingdom last week)

Never would I ever have guessed we’d still have sub-30 average waits at Hollywood Studios in mid-October. Say goodbye to them, because they’re not going to be back until next year. And we also have Magic Kingdom retaking its rightful place with the lowest average wait times thanks to a string of crowd level 1 party days.

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 71% of what was posted. This is much higher than our historical average! I guess when wait times are “hey the line is empty,” there’s no reason to inflate it anyway 🙂 Overall, it means that if the posted wait time at a popular attraction was 50 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait a little over 35 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week is … Buzz Lightyear. At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were only 44% of posted wait times in the past week. That means that if the attraction had a 20 minute posted wait, you probably would have actually only waited less than 9 minutes instead. Less than half of what was posted. Remember to always check the Lines app for predicted actual waits instead of believing what is posted.

This Week’s Wait Time Rock Star

Between October 8th and 14th, we had almost 700 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was rdammann, with 30 overall timed waits – 5 lightning lane waits, 20 standby waits, 2 single rider waits and 3 virtual queue waits. Thanks for all of that timing, rdammann! It unfortunately does not compete with the the 97 timed waits in a single week from our current timing champion, preef.

Looking Ahead: October 15 – 21

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. That means the 15th will already be in the past when you read this post. Welcome to the future.

This week should see a continuation of upward crowd trends as people with vacations … aren’t cancelling them anymore, hopefully. I fully expect this week to have overall crowd levels in the 5-7 range instead of the hurricane-cause 1-4 ranges of the past couple of weeks.

In a weird quirk of Disney-Data-Dump weeks and real weeks, even though there are only 4 parties per week at the Magic Kingdom, 5 of them happen over the next 7 days. Only the 16th and 19th don’t have Halloween parties, which means those days will be incredibly crowded – especially at night for fireworks.

This week looks like it holds all glorious weather: not too hot, and all sunny with no rain. Hopefully this helps minimize attraction downtime.

Were you in the parks this past week, or are you headed there soon? Let me know in the comments below!