Disney Data Dump April 12 2023

Welcome to a very special, and hopefully one-time-only, edition of the Disney Data Dump! This article was supposed to go out yesterday like normal, and all of the data was pulled for it to go out yesterday. Unfortunately, this intrepid author had a bit of an incident in the form of a car accident. Thankfully, I’m okay, and the gracious folks running this fine blog gave me a one-day extension on my article 🙂 You’re still just getting 7 days of data. Pretend you’re time travelling and it’s still Wednesday. We’ll have fun with it together!

Observed Crowd Levels 4/4 – 4/10

As we move into April when Spring Break crowds tend to start calming down, we’re still seeing a lot of orange and red on this overall crowd view. And it’s interesting that while it seems like those crowds are moderating as we moved through the Easter weekend, things popped right back up on Monday following the weekend. We’ll have to keep an eye out on wait times this week to see if things get back to moderate in the next couple of days.

When we look at things at a park-by-park level, we can pick out a few more trends. As per usual, Hollywood Studios crowds stayed rather high throughout the entire week. Magic Kingdom “held” its crowds a little better, so it stayed pretty steady throughout the week, but with slightly lower wait times (relatively speaking) compared to Studios.

EPCOT and Animal Kingdom were much more variable throughout the week, especially on Easter Sunday. Unlike Magic Kingdom, which hovered between crowd levels 7 and 9 throughout the past 7 days, EPCOT and Animal Kingdom both varied all of the way between crowd levels 5 and 10.

Each week, I’m giving you a very transparent look into how our crowd level predictions performed. Each day at each park is one data point, so this week we have 28 different crowd level predictions to evaluate each week. Any time a prediction is within one or two crowd levels, things won’t really “feel” much different than what we predicted. Being off by 3 or more crowd levels is where we’d like to be more accurate because 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 71% of the time. This is still high compared to our historical average. 82% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, and that means we earn a B- for our predictions this past week. There were 5 different park-days where predictions missed by 3 crowd levels, but no misses bigger than that, which is much different than many of the weeks so far this year.

Attraction Downtime 4/4 – 4/10

If we average out all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past two weeks, it comes out to 4% of attractions unexpectedly being down. This is trending back up from the low downtime numbers we saw during peak Spring Break crowds. And the park with the biggest issues was Magic Kingdom, with 5.9% of its capacity lost due to unexpected downtime. Every other park had 3.5% downtime or lower, so Magic Kingdom was the big outlier.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on April 5th. On that day, 5% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. The worst park-day of the week was at Magic Kingdom on the April 5th. On that day, 9% of the capacity at that park was lost due to unexpected downtime. Magic Kingdom was open for 14 hours on the 5th, so 9% downtime is the equivalent of the whole park being down for almost over an hour and 15 minutes. This may have had an impact on wait times and crowd levels, since Magic Kingdom was predicted to be an 7 and ended up being a 8.

Attraction Downtime

The worst offender of the past week is our classic friend, Pirates of the Caribbean, which was unexpectedly down for approximately 30% of the past week. 30%! This is a huge number, and any “major” attraction being down for a third of a week is a big deal. The worst day for the Pirates was on April 5th, when it was unexpectedly down for 75% of the day. But there were plenty of other days of the past week with significant downtime issues too. Only on the 10th did Pirates have a downtime-free day.

Rope Drop Downtime

Here are this week’s problematic offenders:

• Magic Kingdom: Pirates of the Caribbean (unavailable for 28% of its first hour of the day)
• EPCOT: Frozen Ever After (unavailable for 33% of its first hour of the day), Test Track (unavailable for 30% of its first hour of the day), Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure (unavailable for 21% of its first hour of the day)
• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash (unavailable for 27% of its first hour of the day), Rise of the Resistance (unavailable for 15% of its first hour of the day)
• Animal Kingdom: Expedition Everest (unavailable for 37% of its first hour of the day)

As expected with such a high overall downtime percentage, Pirates shows up on the rope drop downtime list. But somewhat surprisingly, there were no other rope drop issues at the Magic Kingdom. The biggest issues were, instead, at EPCOT and Hollywood Studios, where basically all good rope drop options had large downtime percentages. At EPCOT, all of the “big three” were down for at least 20% of the rope drop hour. And at Hollywood Studios, we see Slinky and Rise both having problems. No bueno. This makes rope dropping either park much less valuable, and much more frustrating.

Wait Times 4/4 – 4/10

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 116 minutes (109 minutes last week)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 142 minutes (110 minutes last week)
• EPCOT: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, average posted wait time of 101 minutes (86 minutes last week)
• Magic Kingdom: Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, average posted wait time of 100 minutes (89 minutes last week)

It’s been a long time since we’ve seen all of the highest average posted wait times in the triple digits! 142 minutes at Flight of Passage is particularly bad. But none of these numbers is exciting or a lot of fun if you’re in those lines.

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 50 minutes (48 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 33 minutes (30 minutes at EPCOT last week)

Just like those attraction average posted waits, the park-wide numbers here are rather shocking. An average wait time for an entire park of 50 minutes is ouch. And when all of the almost-no-wait attractions of Magic Kingdom can only bring down the park-wide average wait to 33 minutes, crazy things have been going on.

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 61% of what was posted. This is significantly lower than our historical average, which means posted wait times are more inflated than normal. If the posted wait time was 60 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait under 37 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week isn’t Peter Pan’s Flight! It’s a miracle. Instead, it is Journey into Imagination with Figment. At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were only 31% of posted wait times in the past week, which means that if Figment had a 20 minute posted wait, you probably would’ve waited just about 6 minutes. Less than a third of what was posted. Ouch. Or yay? Remember to always check the Lines app for predicted actual waits instead of believing what is posted.

Actual Wait Time Rock Star

The Actual Wait Time Rock Star for the past week was … mendozasm, who submitted 29 actual wait times through the Lines App over the last 7 days! This includes 11 FastPass waits, 16 Standby waits and 2 Virtual Queue waits. Thank you for all of that timing, mendzasm! But you didn’t claim the all-time record, which is still held by shop.kgb, with 50 recorded wait times in a single week.

In the next week, if you’re able to grab TRON virtual queue or lightning lane waits for us, that would be incredibly helpful! We’re still trying to get an idea of what operations are like after “full” opening. And be sure to give it attraction ratings in the post-visit survey too!

Looking Ahead: April 11th through 17th

Thanks to accident-related delays, this post is coming to you even more out of date than normal. So you’ll be reading this on the 13th, when the 11th and 12th have already passed. We’ll pretend I’m still looking into the future and such.

Crowds are still going to stay a little elevated through the 13th, but after that point we should see things start to drop back to a moderate level. This applies to all parks to some extent, but keep in mind that even on moderate days, Hollywood Studios tends to stay up at a 7 or 8. We’ve also got sold-out reservations at Magic Kingdom on the 14th, but after that availability eases back up.

The Springtime Surprise runDisney event happens this weekend, but the longest event is a 10-miler. Still, this may impact transportation times to the parks. the shorter distances may also mean that the parks won’t be as empty as they have been during other runDisney events. Usually that marathon day is a lovely time to be in Magic Kingdom, if you can make it there.