Disney Data Dump November 6 2024

I know what you’re all thinking. You’re ready for some data that isn’t about the election. Never fear, Disney Data Dump is here. You don’t have to wait for your weekly batch of numbers anymore. Take a deep breath, relax, keep calm, and read along.

Observed Crowd Levels October 29 – November 4

Is Halloween the new September? Well, it’ll depend on the year and when Disney schedules the Wine and Dine Half Marathon. But this continues a trend of non-winter holidays emptying out the parks. And then we clearly see the arrival of Jersey week (or the weekend before Jersey week). These crowd level 5s actually aren’t as bad as past years. So it’s some of the highest crowds we’ve seen this fall, but still down from the past two years.

Those late October days are crazy. We usually don’t see crowds that low during October unless a hurricane has emptied out the park. Those are crowd levels that we usually only see during Labor Day week. I hope some of you were there to enjoy it.

… and then November. We’re still seeing EPCOT at the most crowded park. Test Track being closed will keep pushing wait times up at other attractions. No spikey party behavior at Magic Kingdom because there are no parties until November 8th. Expect moderate crowds there until that date.

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 each week we have 28 different crowd level predictions to evaluate. 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 36% of the time. Better than last week, but still lower than normal. And, 57% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, so that means we get another F for our predictions in the past week. We’re still just seeing crowds significantly below predictions. If you had subtracted 2 crowd levels from the predictions at every park every day, you would’ve been spot on, on average. The biggest miss of the week was an overprediction by 5 crowd levels, at Hollywood Studios on the 29th, when a crowd level of 6 was predicted, but the actual crowd level was a 1.

Attraction Downtime October 29 – November 4

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 2.9% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s exactly the same as last week, and continues to be much below our historical average. This week, EPCOT was the park with the most overall downtime, averaging 3.6% of its capacity lost to downtime throughout the week. With an already-small slate of attractions, downtime at EPCOT makes a big impact and contributes to some of those higher crowd levels.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on November 1st. On that day, 4% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. The worst park-day of the week was on October 31st, at EPCOT. On Halloween, 6% of attraction capacity was lost at EPCOT due to unexpected downtime. The park was open for 12 hours on the 31st, so 6% downtime is the equivalent of the whole park being down for 43 minutes. A decent amount, but nothing compared to some of our other worst-of days.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offender

We have a brand-new “winner” of this category today. Oddly, Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway was the WDW attraction with the worst overall downtime. This week, Runaway Railway was unexpectedly down for 10% of the week. That also may be our lowest “winning” percentage ever. But still the worst of the week. Easily the worst day for Runaway Railway was on November 1st, when the ride was down for 41% of the day. It started the day broken and couldn’t really reliably get its act together until 4 pm.

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: Seven Dwarfs Mine Train (23%), Under the Sea (23%), Space Mountain (13%), Mad Tea Party (11%)
• EPCOT: Living with the Land (33%), Cosmic Rewind (20%), Spaceship Earth (17%), Frozen Ever After (15%), The Seas with Nemo (13%)
• Hollywood Studios: Rise of the Resistance (23%), Runaway Railway (17%)
• Animal Kingdom: Na’vi River Journey (13%)

Rope drop at EPCOT this week was just THE WORST. Unless you were entering from International Gateway and doing Remy first, in which case you were fine. Everyone else was a little bit unlucky. Cosmic Rewind is now making regular appearances on this list, which is concerning.

Elsewhere, we didn’t have many big surprises. 7DMT continues to underwhelm at rope drop. Always have a backup plan if you’re trying to go there first thing. Same with Rise of the Resistance.

Wait Times October 29 – November 4

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 63 minutes (57 minutes last week)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 57 minutes (53 minutes last week)
• EPCOT: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, average posted wait time of 52 minutes (51 minutes last week)
• Magic Kingdom: TRON, average posted wait time of 59 minutes (64 minutes last week)

They very empty first three days of the week balanced out some of the moderate crowds of the second half of the week to give us low-ish wait times at all headliners overall. But I expect all of these to see significant increases over the next week or two with Jersey week and Veterans Day weekend.

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 (30 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 20 minutes (20 minutes last week too)

Some rock-bottom waits at Hollywood Studios at the beginning of the week dragged it back down to the sub-30 range overall. And Magic Kingdom winning lowest overall wait time is slightly misleading. It had an average wait time of 20.4 minutes. Animal Kingdom had an average wait time of 20.8, and EPCOT had an average wait of 20.9. All very closed and all mostly uncrowded until the weekend hit.

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 67% of what was posted. This continues a downward trend back toward our historical average. Overall, it means that if the posted wait time at a popular attraction was 50 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait 34 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week is, once again, Gran Fiesta Tour. At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were only 37% of posted wait times in the past week. That means that if the attraction had a 15 minute posted wait, you probably would have actually only waited less than 6 minutes instead. Almost a third 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 29th and November 4th, we had just over 1300 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was flandersb, with 32 overall timed waits – 1 lightning lane wait, 28 standby waits, 1 single rider wait, and 2 virtual queue waits. Thanks for all of that timing, flandersb! It unfortunately does not compete with the the 97 timed waits in a single week from our current timing champion, preef.

Looking Ahead: November 5 – November 18

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. That means the 5th will already be in the past when you read this post. Don’t look back.

And we’ve got a double-bonus edition two weeks from now, because next week at this time I’ll be floating along in the sunny Bahamas. And no one wants to ruin that vibe with blogging. I’ll be in the parks (three of them!) on November 9th, and then cruising on the Fantasy from November 10th-16th, finishing up with Jollywood Nights on the 16th. If you’d like to follow along with any of that, head over to @raisingminniemes on Instagram.

I expect the rest of Jersey week and Veteran’s Day weekend to stick with moderate crowd levels – potentially getting toward the higher end of moderate over the long weekend. After that, based on the past couple of months, things may empty back out again until we hit Thanksgiving.

A couple of unique things are happening over the next two weeks. Disney is filming its televised Christmas parade and musical performances in Magic Kingdom on November 9th. That will mean that Main Street should be packed all day, but wait times elsewhere around the park would be lower than you’d expect on a long weekend.

We’ve also got the restart of party season with the first Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party on November 8th and the first Jollywood Nights on November 9th. That will certainly lead to some spiky behavior at Magic Kingdom, but not so much at Hollywood Studios. Since Jollywood Nights starts later and day guests can still watch Fantasmic before they leave, there aren’t big swings in crowds on those party days.

 

Were you in the parks over Halloween, or will you be there over the next two weeks? Let me know below!