By the Numbers June 2024

It’s summertime in Walt Disney World, and with that come lots of numbers – crowd levels, wait times, unexpected downtime, temperatures … number of humans devastated at the demise of the waffle sandwiches. Summer 2023 was surprisingly uncrowded, and now we have our first full month of data about Summer 2024. Did things bounce back up? Or are we continuing to see that summer is the new offseason? Let’s see what the data has to say!

June 2024 Crowd Calendar Performance

Keep in mind, this doesn’t give us information about the actual crowd levels themselves. We’ll see more about that later in this post. This just shows what happened compared to predictions. When crowds were lower than predicted, the day will show a negative number and have purple shading. When crowds were higher than predicted, the day will show a positive number and have orange shading. Anything within 1 crowd level we’ll call “close enough” and not shade either way.

So what happened in June? Well, the first thing that jumps out is the total lack of orange. That’s been a strong theme so far this year. Crowds are consistently coming in well under predictions. This is great news if you’ve already planned a trip and experience lower crowds than what you expected. It’s maybe not-great news if you do something like purchase Genie+ thinking you’ll need it, and it turns out wait times were low anyway. We’d love for all of those days to be un-colored and perfectly predictable.

June 2024 Crowd Levels

Can you believe these colors during a summer month?! The average crowd level during the month of June was just over 4. That’s below average (throughout the year, things should average out between crowd level 5 and 6). And only four days in the month popped up above average at all – June 17th through 20th. This all points to low-to-moderate wait times that should be manageable at every park. It’s just the temperatures that were mostly unmanageable, contributing to those lower crowds and lower wait times, especially during peak hours.

Getting even more specific allows us to pick out more trends. First, Animal Kingdom is rock-solid and steady. Wait times and crowd levels barely moved throughout the month, other than June 30th.

Second, Magic Kingdom has been a relative ghost town this month. Those crowd level one days are typically only seen on party days in the early fall – not in the middle of summer. But there were five of them last month! In fact, the average crowd level throughout June at Magic Kingdom was 3. And that’s mostly thanks to a couple of spikes. On 12 out of the 30 days in June, the crowd level was 2 or lower. It was a great month to be in Magic Kingdom.

EPCOT and Hollywood Studios were our two most-crowded parks of the month, but neither ever went above a crowd level 8, and even those were exceedingly rare. Instead, every park stayed moderate or below for what is typically one of the busiest vacation months of the year.

Bonus: Magic Kingdom Retrospective

Just how uncrowded was this June? Let’s compare it to the past two years. Last year, everyone was surprised at how “empty” Walt Disney World was throughout the summer. Some fun-minded people even blamed it on Taylor Swift … but I digress. Take that shocking drop from summer 2022 to summer 2023, and then drop it again by the same amount and you have 2024.

The average posted wait is 10 minutes lower at every attraction throughout every day, and the average actual wait is 4 minutes lower at every attraction throughout every day. In the course of a full park day, that adds up to significant savings.

Attraction Downtime June 2024

In the summer months, downtime is always at its peak. So it’s not surprising that overall downtime is hovering just under 5% for the month of June (disappointing, but not surprising). What is interesting is that Hollywood Studios had the lowest downtime of any park in the past month. This is partially due one of its least reliable attractions (Rock’n’Roller Coaster) being down for extended refurbishment. But it does mean that Rise of the Resistance didn’t have a terrible month either. Instead, the problems were mostly at Magic Kingdom. More on that below!

Overall Attraction Downtime

Several attractions had downtime that was significantly above average in March. Numbers in parentheses represent the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime this month:

Magic Kingdom: Seven Dwarfs Mine Train (15.5%), Big Thunder Mountain Railroad (11.7%), Pirates of the Caribbean (9.9%)
EPCOT: Test Track (12.3%), Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure (10.6%), Spaceship Earth (9.2%)
Hollywood Studios: Rise of the Resistance (10.4%), Slinky Dog Dash (9.8%)
Animal Kingdom: Kali River Rapids (13.1%), Expedition Everest (12.3%)

Not much out of the ordinary in these results, other than potentially Seven Dwarfs Mine Train being the most unreliable attraction of June. And Space Mountain not being on the list at all! Another interesting note – Pirates of the Caribbean was having a perfectly smooth start to June. Through the 16th, it only averaged 5% downtime. And ten of those days had zero downtime. But in the second half of the month, downtime rocketed up to 15.5%, and there were only two days without any downtime. That’s an average of two hours of downtime at this classic attraction during a 13-hour park day. Something is going very wrong at Pirates.

Rope Drop Attraction Downtime

Even more attractions had downtime problems at rope drop. Once again, numbers in parentheses represent the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime this month. This is just downtime in the first hour after the attraction is supposed to be open each morning:

Magic Kingdom: Big Thunder Mountain Railroad (23%), Pirates of the Caribbean (21.7%), Seven Dwarfs Mine Train (10.8%)
EPCOT: Test Track (17.1%), Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure (13.2%)
Hollywood Studios: Rise of the Resistance (18.5%), Runaway Railway (8.4%)
Animal Kingdom: Expedition Everest (12.8%)

Thanks to a little bit of stabilization at Hollywood Studios, Magic Kingdom was easily the hardest park to effectively rope drop this month. Most people will head to Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, and there’s a 90% chance that it’s up and running. Ideally that would be higher. And then if you don’t have access to early entry, you’ll likely want to head to Adventureland and Frontierland first … where 2 out of the 3 decent rope drop options are down almost a quarter of the time. Thank goodness for good, reliable Jungle Cruise.

Wait Times June 2024

Let’s look at two specific examples for the attractions with the some of the highest average wait times for the entire month.

This graph is remarkable – there are a decent number of days in the past month where the average posted wait at Slinky Dog Dash was hovering around 60 minutes. That includes posted wait times from the morning, evening, and the most crowded part of the day. And that’s posted wait – actuals would have been significantly lower.

Even more importantly, even the most crowded days didn’t see obscenely high posted waits. Things topped out at 110 minutes on June 21st. Back in March there were 10 days that had higher average posted waits than that!

Wait times at Flight of Passage are more stable throughout the month, other than a couple of really “bad” days that weren’t all that bad. In general, the average posted wait time was between 60 and 80 minutes most days, and only once popping up to 130 minutes instead. As long as you avoided the 20th and 21st, you could have easily ridden Flight of Passage without too much hassle – especially later in the day.

Posted Wait Time Inflation

Throughout the month of June, we got over 4500 timed actual standby waits. With these waits we can compare what was posted when the visitor entered the standby line to how long they actually waited. This can help you make better decisions about things like whether or not you should hop into line at a given posted wait time, or if you need to trust the high posted wait times and buy Genie+ (or LLMP) to avoid them … or not.

In June, actual wait times averaged 63% of what was posted when the visitor entered the queue. That means if the average posted wait at any attraction was 60 minutes, you could expect to wait less than 38 minutes instead. Or, for example, you have that 110 minute posted wait at Slinky Dog Dash. You should only expect to wait about 69 minutes. Still a lot, but much less than what was posted!

The attraction that had the most posted wait time inflation was … Mad Tea Party. For those who chose to time their wait for spinning in teacups, the actual wait times only averaged 45% of what was posted. Less than half! That means if the posted wait time at Mad Tea Party was 20 minutes, you probably would have only waited 9 minutes instead.

Did you visit Walt Disney World in June? Were you pleasantly surprised by the lack of crowds? Let me know in the comments!