Disney Data Dump – April 2 2025

Welcome back to the Disney Data Dump! Spring Break season is starting to wind down, and the parks are breathing a little easier (… as if they were ever struggling with crushing crowds in the first place). Crowd levels took a noticeable dip compared to recent weeks, especially in the past few days, offering a peak into what we can probably expect in April before we get to any Easter rush. Let’s take a closer look at what the numbers had to say.

Observed Crowd Levels March 25 – 31

I’m officially dubbing this season “Slow Spring”. Look at that slow-down of crowds! If Spring Break peaks at crowd level 6 … that’s good news for everyone other than Disney. On the 31st as an example, Tron, Cosmic Rewind, and Flight of Passage all had average posted waits that were 60 minutes or less. Not a bad time to be in the World! We’ll see if things bounce back up around Easter, but I don’t see any reason for things to get crowded before then.

Last week I called out that crowd level behavior had “flipped” compared to what we might consider normal. Hollywood Studios and Magic Kingdom, while they still have some high waits, have overall lower crowd levels. That’s because they have more attractions to absorb crowds. But Animal Kingdom and EPCOT just don’t. And although crowds have started to go down, TONS of people are still buying LLMP and LLSP. Why does this disproportionately impact parks with fewer attractions?

Let’s take Animal Kingdom as our example. LLSP for Flight of Passage was still sold out on March 31st. So a large number of people in the park had a time to go skip the line at Flight of Passage, and didn’t want to wait in line for it otherwise. That meant they spread out to other attractions and increased the wait times there. When the park is crowded, this doesn’t make a big difference. But when the park is emptier, it causes some weird behavior. In this case, it means that the wait time at Flight of Passage was actually lower than the wait at Na’vi River Journey for most of the day, and lower than the wait at Kilimanjaro Safaris for quite a bit of the day too.

I call this behavior “wait time inversion” – and it happens at LLSP attractions when the crowd level is low. All thanks to the FOMO of pre-purchasing your line-skipping abilities.

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 46% of the time. After a much better rate last week, that’s a big drop back toward the average of the past year or so. And, 75% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, so that means we get a C for our predictions in the past week. As has been the trend since … at least summer 2024, all misses were over-predictions. No under-estimates – only over-estimates. So, overall, crowds still tend to underwhelm. Good news if you’re in the parks. Bad news if you’re Disney. The biggest miss of the week was an overprediction by 4 crowd levels, which happened at Hollywood Studios on March 31st. On that day, the park was predicted to be a crowd level 8, but only ended up being a crowd level 4.

Attraction Downtime March 25 – 31

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 2.7% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s a very low number compared to our historical average in our weekly tracking, and it’s even lower than last week! It’s clear that Disney is trying to keep things running for a more crowded season. This week, Hollywood Studios was the park with the most overall downtime, averaging 3.6% of its capacity lost to downtime throughout the week. Thankfully, crowds have been pretty light at Hollywood Studios anyway, and that overall downtime isn’t too bad.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on March 26th. On that day, 5.3% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. But the worst park-day of the week was on March 30th, at Hollywood Studios. On that day, 11% of attraction capacity was lost at Studios due to unexpected downtime. Hollywood Studios was open for 12 hours on the 30th, so 11% downtime is the equivalent of the entire park being shut down for almost 80 minutes. Not a good day. And even still, the crowd level only ended up being a 4!

Attraction Downtime Worst Offender

This week, Expedition Everest was the WDW attraction with the worst overall downtime. The ride was unexpectedly down for 11% of the week. It’s one of the lower “winning” percentages we’ve had, so I guess we’ll take it. I think it’s also worth noting that Runaway Railways was just behind, also rounding to 11% downtime for the week. The worst day for Everest was on March 28th, when the ride was down for 28% of the day. But it was also down for more than 20% of the day on the 26th too.

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: Space Mountain (33%), Tiana’s Bayou Adventure (30%), TTA PeopleMover (15%), Magic Carpets (10%)
• EPCOT: Cosmic Rewind (13%), Frozen Ever After (10%)
• Hollywood Studios: Runaway Railway (24%), Toy Story Mania (14%), Rock’n’Roller Coaster (14%), Slinky Dog Dash (13%)
• Animal Kingdom: Expedition Everest (18%)

Let me just officially call this out into the universe – Magic Kingdom needs to pull itself together. Space Mountain is a HUGE early entry draw. In the before-times (when Tron didn’t offer standby), 90% of MK’s early entry crowd went to Fantasyland. Now it’s closer to 25%. The other 75% heads to Tomorrowland. And most of those are either immediately lining up for Tron (do not recommend) or are riding Space Mountain before lining up for Tron. If Space Mountain is down a THIRD of the time, that’s no bueno.

And then the other big regular rope drop draw is Tiana’s, and it’s down for 30% of its first hour of the day too! These are two big pillars that are strategically good rope drop choices, but you absolutely need to have a backup.

EPCOT had a relatively bad week too, at least for Main Entrance folks. Cosmic Rewind is the obvious first choice, and Frozen Ever After should be second choice. But if both are down 10% of the time, that’s a little of a roll of the dice.

And then we have Hollywood Studios, where at least Rise is reliable (what world are we living in?!), but Rock’n’Roller Coaster just needs to go ahead and get its retheming, and try to address whatever is going on with its continued downtime issues.

Okay. Rant(s) over.

Wait Times March 25 – 31

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 64 minutes (was 92 minutes last week)
• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 72 minutes (was 84 minutes last week)
• Magic Kingdom: TRON, average posted wait time of 74 minutes (was 91 minutes last week)
• EPCOT: Cosmic Rewind, average posted wait of 85 minutes (was 92 minutes last week)

Look. At. Those. Drops! The average posted wait at Flight of Passage was almost THIRTY minutes lower than it was last week. I had multiple people messaging me on Instagram bragging about how they walked up to Flight of Passage in the middle of the day and had a 30 minute wait – or less. Great news for people in the park. Not-as-great-news for the thousands of people that paid for LLSP to skip the negligible line.

As an example, the average posted wait for Flight of Passage on March 31st was … 44 minutes. And so actual wait times were even less than that!

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 39 minutes (was 45 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 25 minutes (was 28 minutes last week)

Animal Kingdom continues its reign at the top! Even with Flight of Passage with lower posted wait times, there’s nothing to really balance it out. On the 31st, when Flight of Passage’s average posted wait was 44 minutes, Na’vi River Journey had the exact same posted wait. And Kilimanjaro Safaris was close too. That keeps the average at Animal Kingdom high. But Magic Kingdom has enough “filler” attractions to keep that average posted wait time lower.

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 significantly above our historical average. That means that posted wait times were more accurate last week than normal. Overall, if the posted wait time at a popular attraction was 60 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait a little over 43 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week was Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin (for the second week in a row!). At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were only 55% of posted wait times in the past week. That means that if the attraction had a 30 minute posted wait, you probably would have actually only waited about 16.5 minutes instead. A little over 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 March 25th and 31st, we had almost 1200 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was julieannlucas, with 29 overall timed waits – and she did it in difficult mode! All 29 were standby waits. Thanks for all of that timing, julieannlucas! It unfortunately does not compete with the the 97 timed waits in a single week from our current timing champion, preef.

Looking Ahead: April 1 – 7

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. That means the 1st will already be in the past when you read this post. Hope you didn’t get too many pranks!

As we look ahead … I’m going to go WAY out on a limb (sarcasm) and say that we should see crowds that are more like the second half of this past week, and less like the week and a half before that. That means crowd levels hovering around 4 instead of 6. Disney expanded hours last week, so if any Spring Break wave was happening, it would’ve been then. #SlowSpring

The weather in Orlando seems to have turned a corner, regularly reaching the 90s every day. That has definitely increased the number of people taking advantage of free water park admission on arrival day (I’ve heard that Blizzard Beach has been closing to everyone other than resort guests on several days). And it means you should be prepared for warm weather. Hydrate and plan some indoor air-conditioning time in the middle of your day!

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