Disney Data Dump – April 16 2025

After weeks of whispering about when the real Spring Break crowds would arrive, the answer is … now. Ish. The second week of April finally brought a noticeable uptick in wait times, with more school districts out and more families visiting Orlando. But even as lines lengthened a bit, the real headline might be what’s not happening—namely, bookings. Disney is rolling out some truly wild summer deals, and it’s clear they’re trying to fill rooms fast. So while this week marks the busiest we’ve seen in a while, the story behind the crowds might just be more important than the crowds themselves. Let’s dig into what happened (and what’s still not happening) in this week’s Disney Data Dump.

Observed Crowd Levels April 8 – 14

Well look at that, Spring Break has finally sprung! Between 20 and 25% of school districts throughout the country are on Spring Break this week. That should be enough to push the parks into the crowd level 6 or 7 range. And that started to happen on Monday. But we need to talk about the elephant in the room, which are all the deals Disney is releasing for the summer. If you’ve been following along with this blog for any amount of time, you should already know that the crowd levels we’ve been seeing this spring are abnormally low. And with economic warning bells going off and Epic Universe opening up this summer, it makes sense that bookings would be light. But the number of deals that Disney is pumping out for this summer is historic. If you’re a Disney+ subscriber, the deal on Cars Suites is the equivalent of 66%+ off of your room price on some dates. And the percentage savings on Animal Kingdom Lodge savanna rooms is almost just as good.

Disney is pulling almost every lever available to tempt people back to the parks – it’ll be interesting to see if it works.

A small round of applause for Hollywood Studios finally catching up to Animal Kingdom and EPCOT on the 14th! Other than that, there’s not much that’s remarkable about the park-by-park numbers. Except for maybe Saturday the 12th – it’s clear that locals are opting for Animal Kingdom and EPCOT, even when their crowd levels are already higher than the other parks.

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 21% of the time. On the positive side, that’s almost double last week! And 64% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, so that means we get a D for our predictions in the past week. But! For the first time in I can’t remember how long, there’s an underprediction in the results! Animal Kingdom was 2 crowd levels higher than it was predicted to be on Saturday, 4/12. And actually, EPCOT was 1 crowd level above prediction on the same day. Still, for the week as a whole, crowd levels were 2.2 crowd levels lower than predicted on average. The biggest miss of the week was an overprediction by 7 crowd levels, which happened at Hollywood Studios on April 1st. On that day, the park was predicted to be a crowd level 9, but only ended up being a crowd level 2. Hollywood Studios was also overpredicted by 6 crowd levels on April 2nd.

Attraction Downtime April 8 – 14

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 3.7% of attractions unexpectedly being down. This continues a slow upward trend, although we’re still below our historical average. This week, EPCOT was the park with the most overall downtime, averaging 5.1% of its capacity lost to downtime throughout the week. Since EPCOT is still missing Test Track, downtime here does tend to have a decent impact on wait times at remaining attractions.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on April 9th. On that day, 6% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. The worst park-day of the week was also on April 9th, at EPCOT. On that day, 11% of attraction capacity was lost at EPCOT due to unexpected downtime. The park was open for 12 hours on the 9th, so 11% downtime is the equivalent of the entire park being shut down for almost 80 minutes. That’s a big deal if you’re focused on the major attractions with longer lines.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offender

This week, Rise of the Resistance was the WDW attraction with the worst overall downtime. Rise! You’ve been doing so well! I was just bragging on you a couple of weeks ago! Rude. The ride was unexpectedly down for 25% of the week. The worst day for Rise was on April 14th, when the ride was down for 57% of the day. Now we know a big reason that the crowd level at Hollywood Studios caught up to Animal Kingdom and EPCOT on that day. All of those Rise-riders had to go into other lines. Rise was also down for half of the day on April 10th.

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 (48%), Tiana’s Bayou Adventure (23%), Space Mountain (14%)
• EPCOT: Journey Into Imagination (28%), Seas with Nemo (20%)
• Hollywood Studios: Rise of the Resistance (57%), Runaway Railway (14%)
• Animal Kingdom: No rope drop downtime issues!

Magic Kingdom has been our problem child for several weeks, but I’ll give it a break this week. The only exception is if you don’t have early entry and you’re trying to hit Adventureland and Tiana’s before lines build. That’s still wildly unpredictable. At this point, your best bet for that strategy is to start at Jungle Cruise and watch for when Tiana’s opens, hopefully soon after you’re off your river adventure.

Obviously Rise being down for over half of its first hour of the day is very not-good. But at least Slinky and Rock’n’Roller Coaster didn’t show up this week. There were still decent rope drop options available.

Gold star of the week goes to Animal Kingdom.

Wait Times April 8 – 14

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 76 minutes (was 55 minutes last week)
• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 71 minutes (was 56 minutes last week)
• Magic Kingdom: TRON, average posted wait time of 75 minutes (was 65 minutes last week)
• EPCOT: Cosmic Rewind, average posted wait of 73 minutes (was 67 minutes last week)

Here’s where we see the impact of slightly increased crowds compared to the past couple of weeks. Average posted waits at super-headliners were up between 6 and 21 minutes throughout the day. Still not anything in the 80 or 90 minute range though. But they’ll all probably be up at that level in next week’s post.

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: Animal Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 42.5 minutes (was 34 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 25 minutes (was 22 minutes last week)

Animal Kingdom not only had the highest wait times of the past week, it also had the highest percentage week-over-week increase. Magic Kingdom is still absorbing its crowds better than any other park, because it has so many different attractions.

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 72% of what was posted. This is right at about our new average. In the Genie+ era, you could expect more like 66%. But in the LLMP era we’re hovering around 72% or 73%. Overall, if the posted wait time at a popular attraction was 60 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait about 43 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week was Gran Fiesta Tour. At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were only 40% 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 8 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 April 8th and 14th, we had over 1000 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was ThomFoolery, with 29 overall timed waits – and the win was in “hard mode,” because all 29 were standby waits. Thanks for all of that timing, ThomFoolery! It unfortunately does not compete with the the 97 timed waits in a single week from our current timing champion, preef.

Looking Ahead: April 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. Congratulations on making it past tax day. Reward yourself with a Disney trip 🙂

Now is the time. It’s officially high Spring Break season. We started to see the impact of all of those traveling families on Monday, and I expect things to stay pretty steady at that slightly higher crowd level 6 or 7 range through the rest of the week. Based on park hours, Disney expects most families to be heading home by Saturday or Sunday, and things should calm WAY down starting on the 20th and 21st.

The weather looks to be playing nice this week, with no rain in the forecast. But that means temperatures will be heading into the upper 80s. Make sure you have your heat-handling strategies ready to use. Drink lots of water and plan some indoor breaks!

Were you in the parks this past week? Or are you headed to Orlando soon? Let me know in the comments below!