Disney Data Dump – April 30 2025

Spring Break is officially in the rearview mirror, and crowd levels are settling in right where we’d hope (well, we as visitors would hope – I’m sure Disney it’s happy about it). Last week brought a few “busier” days here and there, but overall the parks stayed nice and manageable, with crowd levels holding pretty steadily below-average. If these spring trends are any indication, May should stay just as calm. It’s shaping up to be a historically light year so far, and we’ll keep tracking how long that lasts.

Observed Crowd Levels April 22 – 28

Look at those beautiful springtime colors! The parks did get up to an “average” crowd level a couple of days last week, but on the whole only managed to average a 4 on our scale of 10 throughout the course of the week. This bodes really well for a light May. And all of the deals Disney has been releasing for the summer means nothing should go too crazy for the next several months either.

How uncrowded are the parks? Historically uncrowded. I went back and pulled crowd levels from the last 16 years, covering just the first four months of each year. 2025 has an average WDW crowd level of 4.8. If we exclude pandemic years (2020 because it got cut short and 2021 because travel hadn’t recovered), the WDW crowd level hasn’t been that low through this point in the year since … 2012! So we’re seeing the least crowded year in 13 years. Of course, back in 2012 the cost of a one-day ticket to Magic Kingdom was $89 and now it’s between $144 and $199. I guess I’m saying I think I’d still rather just get in a time machine back to 2012, please.

 

Animal Kingdom maintained its high(er) wait times this week compared to every other. It’s not surprising that it had the most crowds on the 22nd, which is the anniversary of the park. That always draws at least a few AK fans that want to celebrate, on top of normal visiting behavior. But it stayed the park with the highest crowd level every day this week, other than the 23rd. Magic Kingdom, meanwhile, continues to hover at the bottom of the crowd level scale most days. I’m really excited about what this means ~4 months from now when party season hits and the park REALLY empties out on party days.

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 25% of the time. That’s back down after a “high” of 39% last week. And 57% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, so that means we get an F for our predictions in the past week. There was one under-prediction this week, at Animal Kingdom on the 26th, when there was a predicted crowd level of 5, but it ended up being a 7. But otherwise things were very over-predicted (lower than expected). But at this point lower than expected is the new expected, yeah? On average, the crowd level at any park any day of the week was more than 2 crowd levels below prediction. The biggest miss of the week was an overprediction by 6 crowd levels, which happened at Hollywood Studios on April 22nd. On that day, the park was predicted to be a crowd level 9, but only ended up being a crowd level 3. April 20th and 21st were both overpredictions by 5 crowd levels, so that was a glorious 3 days in Hollywood Studios.

Attraction Downtime April 22 – 28

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 4.1% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s quite a jump from what we’ve seen over the past month. It’s almost like the spring break “crowds” left and Disney figured it didn’t need to focus so much on keeping things online? Conspiracy theory. This week, Magic Kingdom was the park with the most overall downtime, averaging 4.6% of its capacity lost to downtime throughout the week. EPCOT was right behind at 4.4%.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on April 22nd. On that day, 7% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. The worst park-day of the week was on April 22nd too, at EPCOT. On that day, 14% of attraction capacity was lost at EPCOT due to unexpected downtime. That’s an ouch. The park was open for 12 hours on the 22nd, so 14% downtime is the equivalent of the entire park shutting down for over 100 minutes.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offender

This week, Pirates of the Caribbean was the WDW attraction with the worst overall downtime. It’s becoming a pretty regular repeat offender here. The ride was unexpectedly down for 20% of the week. The worst day for Pirates was on April 27th, when the ride was down for 72% of the day. But there were several other days where it had around 20% downtime 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: Haunted Mansion (21%), Seven Dwarfs Mine Tran (13%), TTA PeopleMover (12%), Pirates of the Caribbean (12%)
• EPCOT: The Seas with Nemo (28%)
• Hollywood Studios: Alien Swirling Saucers (14%), Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run (13%), Rock’n’Roller Coaster (10%)
• Animal Kingdom: Kali River Rapids (14%)

First, let’s call out what’s not on this list – Tiana’s Bayou Adventure and Rise of the Resistance! Hooray! After the past couple of weeks, that’s very good news. I’ll take downtime at Alien Swirling Saucers and Pirates over Rise and Tiana any day.

EPCOT and Animal Kingdom had relatively good rope drop weeks too. But no gold stars for any parks this week.

Wait Times April 22 – 28

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 73 minutes (was 88 minutes last week)
• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 68 minutes (was 79 minutes last week)
• Magic Kingdom: TRON, average posted wait time of 73 minutes (was 79 minutes last week)
• EPCOT: Cosmic Rewind, average posted wait of 69 minutes (was 77 minutes last week)

Lots of big drops across the board at headliners, compared to last week which was “peak” spring break season. Still, it’s important to keep in mind that these are posted waits at headliners, so actual waits were in many cases much lower.

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 41 minutes (was 50 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 23.5 minutes (was 27 minutes last week)

It’s still crazy to me that the average wait at Animal Kingdom is almost double the average wait at Magic Kingdom. But that’s because for every TRON at Magic Kingdom there’s also a Mad Tea Party. For every Flight of Passage at Animal Kingdom, there are … 6 other high-ish wait attractions. No balance, other than totally non-wait activities like animal trails and Wilderness Explorers (which are the things you absolutely should be doing).

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 67% of what was posted. We haven’t seen a number that low since the Genie+ era! With LLMP, it’s typically been closer to 72% or 73%. So that’s interesting and we’ll keep an eye on it to see if it’s a new trend or just a blip. Overall, if the posted wait time at a popular attraction was 60 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait about 40 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week was Expedition Everest. 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 22nd and 28th, we had over 900 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was bdesjadon, with 35 overall timed waits – 11 Lightning Lane waits and 24 standby waits. That’s two wins a row! 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 29 – May 5

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. That means the 29th will already be in the past when you read this post. Welcome to the future!

There are a couple of interesting operating hours notes for the next week at WDW. At this point, it’s pretty rare for AK to stay open past 6 pm. If it does, it’s typically because Disney expects some heavier crowds. But May 2nd through 5th AK has closing times of 8 pm. And as an extra super spectacular bonus, on May 5th, Animal Kingdom has a very rare occurrence of Extended Evening Theme Park hours (usually they’re at EPCOT on Mondays). That means if you’re at Animal Kingdom you can be in the park until 10 pm! Honestly, I’m tempted to book a flight down just for that.

Magic Kingdom also has some later hours on May 3rd, with an 11 pm closing time. And Hollywood Studios opens half an hour earlier than normal on May 4th (it’s Star Wars Day, y’all).

All of this is interesting, but I don’t think it should mean that the parks are suddenly crushed with humans. They’re all weekend dates, so it’s more likely that Disney thinks local annual passholders are going to be visiting over the weekend. Weather should be nice, but getting warmer.

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