Disney Data Dump – April 23 2025

Spring Break crowds are officially behind us, and the parks are settling into their pre-summer rhythm. This past week marked what should have been the peak of Spring Break season. But if you’ve been following along, you know that the expected swell in crowd levels hasn’t materialized in the way we’ve seen in previous years. And even the highs that happened quickly tapered off as families headed home from the last big week of Spring Break. Let’s look at exactly what happened over the past week!

Observed Crowd Levels April 15 – 21

There you have it, the most crowded week of Spring Break. Are you impressed? We hit a a crowd level 7 on a grand total of one day in all of April. And things cooled off really quickly as people made their way back home over Easter weekend. I see no reason why crowd levels should pop up above a green (4) between now and Memorial Day. Maybe something weird will happen on the weekends or something. But otherwise, it should be smooth sailing from now until summer.

Look at those last two days! Very interesting to see how number of overall attractions is very clearly impacting overall wait times and crowd levels. Animal Kingdom has the fewest attractions, and it’s staying the most crowded. Magic Kingdom has enough for everyone to do, so wait times stay nice and low.

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 39% of the time. On the positive side, that’s much larger than the past two weeks! 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. And we’re back to no under-predictions. For the week as a whole, crowd levels were 2 crowd levels lower than predicted on average. The biggest miss of the week was an overprediction by 5 crowd levels, which happened at Hollywood Studios on April 20th and 21st. On the 20th, the park was predicted to be a crowd level 8, but only ended up being a crowd level 3. And on the 21st, the park was predicted to be crowd level 9, but ended up being a 4.

Attraction Downtime April 15 – 21

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 2.4% of attractions unexpectedly being down. This is back down to one of the lowest numbers we’ve ever seen – well below the historical average. This week, Magic Kingdom was the park with the most overall downtime, averaging 3% of its capacity lost to downtime throughout the week. Thankfully there is so much to do there that 3% downtime is barely noticeable.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on April 15th. On that day, 5% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. The worst park-day of the week was on April 17th, at Animal Kingdom. On that day, 6% of attraction capacity was lost at Animal Kingdom due to unexpected downtime. This might be our lowest-ever “losing” percentage for a week. The park was open for 12 hours on the 17th, so 6% downtime is the equivalent of the entire park being shut down for almost 45 minutes.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offender

This week, Enchanted Tales with Belle was the WDW attraction with the worst overall downtime. That’s a new winner for this category! The ride was unexpectedly down for 15% of the week. The worst day for Belle was easily on April 20th, when the ride was down for 99% of the day. Otherwise, it had a pretty reliable week. But so did every other attraction at WDW. 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: Tiana’s Bayou Adventure (35%), Magic Carpets (16%), TTA PeopleMover (10%)
• EPCOT: Frozen Ever After (20%), Spaceship Earth (10%)
• Hollywood Studios: Runaway Railway (36%), Rise of the Resistance (15%)
• Animal Kingdom: No rope drop downtime issues!

This list looks much better than the past couple of weeks. Still some pretty major rope drop issues at Tiana’s and Runaway Rail way, but otherwise nothing too terrible. At this point, you should just expect Tiana’s not to open on time. Check the app and head that way when you see it opens. Wait times don’t build very quickly there.

Frozen is another problem if it’s being unreliable early. But really this should be a second stop for a lot of people anyway – after Remy or Cosmic Rewind.

And it’s the second week in a row that Animal Kingdom gets a gold star!

Wait Times April 15 – 21

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 88 minutes (was 76 minutes last week)
• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 79 minutes (was 71 minutes last week)
• Magic Kingdom: TRON, average posted wait time of 79 minutes (was 75 minutes last week)
• EPCOT: Cosmic Rewind, average posted wait of 77 minutes (was 73 minutes last week)

Last week I predicted that every one of these would be between 80 and 90 minutes. Joke’s on me, I guess. Only Flight of Passage made it over 80 minutes posted on average. Everything is still up compared to last week, but not by much.

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 50 minutes (was 42.5 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 27 minutes (was 25 minutes last week)

Here’s where we really see the impact of so few attractions being open at Animal Kingdom. I’ll get back up on my soap box that Animal Kingdom has a lot of things to do that don’t have lines. It rewards exploration more than hustling. So don’t let these numbers scare you off. But an average posted wait across all attractions of 50 minutes is ouch. All other parks only saw their overall average jump 2-4 minutes, but AK jumped 8 minutes (20%). There’s nowhere for increased crowds to go – unless they follow my advice and explore and play 🙂

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 Na’vi River Journey. At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were only 47% of posted wait times in the past week. That means that if the attraction had a 60 minute posted wait, you probably would have actually only waited 28 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 15th and 21st, we had almost 900 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was bdesjadon, with 32 overall timed waits – 6 Lightning Lane waits and 26 standby waits. Thanks for all of that timing, bdesjadon! It unfortunately does not compete with the the 97 timed waits in a single week from our current timing champion, preef.

Looking Ahead: April 22 – 28

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. That means the 22nd will already be in the past when you read this post. Happy belated birthday to Animal Kingdom!

Nothing remarkable is happening in the WDW parks over the next week. And even so, Magic Kingdom has some “extended” hours – staying open until 11 pm almost every night (except for the Extended Evening Hours on Wednesday, and closing at 10 pm on the 28th). That should keep crowd levels especially low at MK. I really see no reason why the overall WDW crowd level should go up above 4 over the next week.

Temperatures are starting to make it into the 90s almost every day, with plenty of sun. Wear light colors, stay hydrated, and plan some indoor time at least once an hour throughout your day!

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